One would think that after all the headaches that the IE team has gotten over the years about non-standard behavior in IE that they would catch on and realize that folks really do like having standards to code to.

Surprise!

Recently though, the IE Blog posted an article about a web developer who was having a problem with lists in RSS Feeds which were being stored in IE's built-in RSS aggregator.

IE Blog's solution? To use non-standard extensions, created by Microsoft, to RSS to support this functionality.

Of course the way it's built it shouldn't have a factor on other RSS Aggregators that don't support this extension, but that's not the point. If Microsoft thinks they have a relevant extension to a standard then submit it to the standards body don't just implement it, provide support in your browser and then release the new version that you like under the CC license and call it good.

Who knows, maybe I'm way off base and Microsoft submitted this extension to the standards board which deals with RSS. They have been putting things into standards more and more (Office 2007 Doc Format, C#).