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.'"

Comments

Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never happen

[chriss]

This is stupid. And false. To quote TFU:

Strictly speaking Apple is not doing anything wrong. RSS is not an official standard governed by a standards body, and anybody can make changes and introduce new elements and extensions.

and

But early tests showed that the feature fails to work with some feed readers because it deviates from common RSS practices.

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.

Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap

[Bogtha]

Strictly speaking Apple is not doing anything wrong. RSS is not an official standard governed by a standards body, and anybody can make changes and introduce new elements and extensions.

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'.

Re:A problem with the readers or with Apple?

[Bogtha]

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.

Please don't speak for anybody but yourself. Having to handle whatever garbage is thrown its way is one of the reasons why alternative browsers have such a difficult time rendering all websites "properly".

It's a big problem, it works not unlike an arms war - as soon as the most popular browser understands a particular type of garbage, the others have to race to catch up. It's completely unnecessary work. So the authors of the XML specification required all XML parsers to immediately stop parsing upon encountering garbage, to ensure that another "arms race" doesn't happen in future.

Postel's Law only works when both sides of the equation are balanced. The producers on the web have made it perfectly clear time and time again that they are not willing to take care with what they produce. So attempting to be liberal in what is accepted is a losing strategy, because you just have to work more and more just to stay in the same place.

RSS is a format based on XML. As such, no, RSS readers should not work in the same way as browser tag soup parsers, otherwise we'll have exactly the same situation we have with HTML all over again.