Active Channels And The CDF File

browser wars 1997 dead

Push technology: subscribe to a website like a TV channel, straight from the IE4 desktop.

In 2026: Dead, and it took push technology's first wave with it. A CDF file described your site as a channel; IE4 put it in the Channel Bar on the Windows desktop and crawled it on a schedule. It arrived in 1997 at the peak of PointCast mania and was gone by Internet Explorer 7, unmissed. RSS did the same job with less ceremony and actually survived.

Where it came from: Microsoft Channel Definition Format, submitted to the W3C in 1997 for Internet Explorer 4's Active Channels. The Channel Bar did not survive the era; RSS did.
Wikipedia ↗W3C submission ↗

<!-- channel.cdf, offered with an Add Active Channel button -->
<pre style="font-size:12px">
&lt;?XML version="1.0"?&gt;
&lt;CHANNEL HREF="http://www.example.com/index.html"&gt;
  &lt;TITLE&gt;My Home Page Channel&lt;/TITLE&gt;
  &lt;ABSTRACT&gt;Updates from my page, pushed to your desktop!&lt;/ABSTRACT&gt;
  &lt;LOGO HREF="http://www.example.com/logo.gif" STYLE="IMAGE"/&gt;
  &lt;SCHEDULE&gt;&lt;INTERVALTIME DAY="1"/&gt;&lt;/SCHEDULE&gt;
  &lt;ITEM HREF="http://www.example.com/news.html"&gt;
    &lt;TITLE&gt;What is new&lt;/TITLE&gt;
  &lt;/ITEM&gt;
&lt;/CHANNEL&gt;
</pre>

<p style="font:13px Verdana">The Add Active Channel button this fed is gone from
every browser, so the file above is all that remains of the channel.</p>

sandboxed demo · breaks nothing but itselfrestart

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