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Apple Breaks RSS with Photocasting
Barry Norton writes "VNUNet reports that the Photocasting feature in Apple's iPhoto application violates core XML and RSS standards. Perhaps the worst part is that, in many cases, this isn't even a case of 'embrace and extend', but just plain doing it wrong. Dave Winer, essentially the creator of RSS, says, 'It's pretty bad. There are lots of errors, the date formats are wrong, there are elements that are not in RSS that aren't in a namespace.'"
This is stupid. And false. To quote TFU:
and
Apple fucked up the implementation of photocasting. Technically they didn't break it, but didn't use it in a way some feed readers expected. This seems to be the result of incompetence, not an attempt to create their own proprietary RSS version.
This looks like a case of a 1.0 version. Common wisdom is that commercial software sucks before 2.0. iPhoto 1.0 was dog slow when you had more than a coupe of hundreds of pictures in your library. Aperture 1.0 messed up some image correction parameters. All this was fixed in the following releases. Open Source software avoids this by staying below 1.0 for a decade. Since Steve Jobs made a big point about photocasting being compatible with existing readers during the MacExpo keynote and there being no sign of intended "embrace and extend", we can assume that this will fixed with the next iPhoto update.
Nothing to be seen here besides another sensational Apple bashing report. Please move along.
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...and throwing up our arms and collectively running around like chickens with our heads cut off as if we're helpless to do anything, which is what seems like everyone is doing in the context of this 'OMG! Apple breaks RSS!' brouhaha, since Apple prides itself on embracing open standards when possible, why not simply report these as bugs and presume they will be fixed, since Apple, you know, is fairly responsive to community concerns and actually likes fixing these sorts of problems that tend to break things for everyone?[1]
- http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphoto.html
- http://bugreport.apple.com/ (trackable, but requires free Apple Developer Connection account)
[1] Strictly speaking Apple is not doing anything wrong. [...] anybody can make changes and introduce new elements and extensions.
This sounds far more like a case of them trying to rush the the product out. As often happens in such situtations, the quality of the product can suffer. This doesn't strike me as a malicious action in any way.
I wouldn't be surprised if these issues were fixed by an update in the near future. Of course, some may question if the software should have been released in the first place, but regardless, it has already been released. Considering Apple's goodwill towards the community, I'm quite confident that these problems will be resolved promptly.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Just about every single comment so far has been berating other commenters for "Apple bashing" and automatically assuming that this was done intentionally and maliciously.
Methinks they prostest *too much*...
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The guy is just bashing a product that doesn't work like all the others.
Remove Apple and insert Google, MS, [Your favorite company here]
NO, this is not something that should be fixed with the next update, if anything, it's an even greater reason to rag on Apple for releasing a broken feature.
In TFA, the guy says he would have been willing to sign a NDA to help Apple straighten this out before they released it.
You seem to be a bit touchy this morning. To much coffee?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It would seem the problem is more with RSS readers in this particular case, more so than it is with Apple and Apple's implementation.
If a web server starts sending back unexpected garbage replies to a web browser, we would all expect the web browser to handle such replies without problem. The same should hold true for RSS readers. They have to be developed in a way to deal with bad data, and if they aren't then they are a low-quality software product.
Does anyone have a list of the readers which were affected by this? If so, we should immediately contribute fixes for the open source readers, while avoiding the rest in the future.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
RSS is XML. As such, processors need to conform to the XML specifications. iPhoto doesn't do this, it gets various things wrong, such as not requiring documents to be well-formed, and ballsing up namespaces.
While it's true that RSS allows you to introduce your own element types via namespaces, that doesn't give you leeway to do whatever the hell you want and call it 'RSS'.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
One thing it's important to understand is that Dave "by name and by nature" Winer has had a grudge against Apple ever since they shipped AppleScript, which made his enormously overpriced Userland Frontier Mac scripting system irrelevant overnight. That's why he tried to reinvent it as a web application platform.
Of course, Winer knows all about incompatible changes to standards. His RSS 0.91 was gratuitously and completely incompatible with the RSS 0.9--that was invented by Netscape, not him. And that was just the start--look at the Wikipedia article on RSS to see how Winer deliberately broke the standards process time and time again.
As to Apple's intentions, it should be noted that they've published DTDs and namespace declarations for their podcasting extensions to RSS implemented in iTunes. I assume they'll do the same for iPhoto, and they just haven't gotten around to it yet. As for bugs in date format, report 'em and see if they get fixed before assuming it's deliberate.
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Coffee? Me? NEVER! Pepsi, actually. But I think this is not really related to my caffein level. I keep it at a very high level, so my brain adapted.
It's about the header: Apple Breaks RSS with Photocasting. I read it, but sort of didn't believe, because this would be contrary to Apples former behavior. So I read the article, which is somewhat sensational by itself, but in the end gives the clear impression that this about a bad implementation, not about an intended design. Barry Norton took the most sensational parts of the article, added some conspiracy and got it posted on slashdot
So maybe the thing I should be really annoyed about is me still being naive and believing that there is a connection between a sensational post on slashdot and reality. Unfortunately, sometimes there is, so I wont simply stop reading slashdot.
BTW, I agree with you that Apple should not have delivered an unfinished version. But I'm not surprised they did. Maybe they didn't realize it, because it works with most RSS readers (the article says some readers don't work). If the post would be titled "Apples Photocasting incompatible with some RSS readers" I would have simply ignored it. But most likely it would never have been posted on slashdot in the first place. Bad "journalism" works.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
Hello, everybody! See my strawman here?
I was going to moderate you but decided to reply instead.
His past comments and recommendations have no bearing on what Apple did - i.e., not adhere to a standard in one of their implementations.
You could go on blaming him and finding fault (well, it's an Apple discussion, who expected anything else), but it doesn't change anything. How do his opinions and past comments change what Apple has done?
It does not, and these kinda strawman arguments don't change a damn thing.
Well there are a lot of loose RSS validators. They are part of the problem.
For example, livejournal.com and sun's java developer RSS feeds are both invalid from an XML perspective. I can't parse sun's feed IN JAVA using the XML parser. Now thats sad. Some guy probably created a servlet (intern?) that does like out.println or something.. No validator should probably display either feed since its not XML friendly. That would mean the feed fails when the developer tests it and then this can never happen. Apple's safari implementation is VERY loose on invalid RSS feeds which in turn causes their developers to make this invalid feed. I think its safe to say apple tested it with their own browser. Wouldn't you?
Obviously, one could write their own parser for an RSS feed without relying on the fact its XML and treat it like an HTML 2.0 document. You know.. write your own parser, don't assume documents are valid.. everything XML was supposed to save us from.
I don't know about others, but when i generate XML documents I often find it difficult to know what characters are safe to escape, etc. & for example is a pain in the ass as are . If you escape them like the suggested escape for iso latin1 < then you are using an ampersand. Oh no... Sometimes parsers react to ' and " as well.
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