Well, the question is almost correct :), but it's wrong by the logic of how is world organized. I think it's IE, as a User Application, had to be ready to support the most Internet standards. But since M$ never studies the market but they prefer to CREATE the standards with their $$$, there is nothing to do for the world but to check if our Web Application/Services "will be supported" by IE7. Such a shame to M$ guys, such a shame, but well, there are (still) so many people using Windows and its "best optimized for the modern Internet" Web Browser called "Internet Explorer" :) I know I am a dreamer, but I really hope that year by year M$ will be loosing its market, until/if they turn to the people their face, not their ass with $$$ symbol written on it as today! Well, what should we expect from the IE7 in respect of the RSS/Atom feeds? Valid only
Is your feed valid ? If you or your customers are outputting content with invalid characters, an undefined namespace, or a non-breaking space ( ) the Windows RSS Platform will disregard your feed updates. A snapshot of Google Reader's subscriptions last December found about 7% of the feeds it indexes are not well-formed .
Use modern feed formats
The platform includes support for feed formats RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom 1.0. If you are still outputting in RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, or Atom 0.3 IE7 will still support the format, but you are encouraged to upgrade to a more recent feed format for the best support. Feeds that reference a DTD are considered a potential security issue and the feed parser will reject the feed and display an error message.
Auto-discovery
Can web browsers easily find your feeds? Internet Explorer 7 tries to auto-discover feeds referenced as a link alternate in your . IE7 mimics Firefox's auto-discovery behavior, so if you notice your feed(s) lighting chicklets in Firefox you should be all set. Your web server can help identify feeds by serving the correct types for each feed type such as application/atom+xml or text/xml. Browsers take a number of steps when trying to identify your feed. If you produce better output the browser does less work!
Check for valid feed names
Do you have a valid feed name? The Windows RSS Platform supports feed names between 1 and 120 characters in length and may not contain a back-slash ("") or Unicode control characters in range 0-31.
Check for valid feed markup
The Feed Validator can help you find more issues in your feeds that might cause problems for feed parsers. The feed validator project is open-source and you can run your own local copy using Python.
P.S. This technology analysis was first time met by me in an article of Mr. Niall Kennedy.
Keywords: Atom feeds, Blog, IE7, Microsoft, RSS feeds, Niall Kennedy
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