June 26, 2005

via XML-Dev | A post from Danny Ayers opens the door to interpretation as to what the most important aspect an XML data feed will contain

Longhorn Developer Center Home: Simple List Extensions Specification

Overview

The Simple List Extensions are designed as extensions to existing feed formats to make exposing ordered lists of items easier and more accessible to users.

The term “list,” as used in this document describes an ordered collection of items with similar properties. For example, a photo album may be described as a “list of photos.”

There is so much fantastic content that I have missed out on over the past few days its nearly mind boggling. A recent post to XML-Dev from Danny Ayers is a perfect example.

Yesterday Microsoft announced an extension [1] for RSS 2.0 that gives support for the list data structure, something else that RSS/RDF has been capable of for 5 years.

Looks like a pattern's emerging...

While I am personally going to avoid the political motivation I would like to bring out one *VERY* important point:

Its all about lists.

A quick and interesting factoid that seems to go unnoticed and yet is something I consider to be one of the most important aspects that helps clarify the future direction, or at very least showcases the original mentality of the designers of the Common Language Infrastructure (.NET) platform:

Since its very first release the .NET platform has shipped with 'clisp' as a demo/sample for tool developers. Depending on whether you chose the default installation location for the SDK this can usually be found at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET\SDK\v1.1\Tool Developers Guide\Samples\clisp

Ya' think thats an accident?

If so, you might want to think again...