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Apple Breaks RSS with Photocasting

Posted by Zonk on from the watch-where-you're-putting-those-tags dept.

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.'"

2 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. From the perspective of an RSS neophyte by yardbird · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I happen to have RSS on the brain at the moment, since I just this week implemented RSS 2.0 for my personal webpage. The comments on the linked articles mostly go like this:

    - It works for me!
    - It doesn't matter that it works for you; it violates standards!
    - But there are no standards for RSS!
    - Are too!

    and so on.

    For a counterpoint, check out this blog entry:

    http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/01/18/Photoc asting-Hyperbole/

    The whole flap is quite a learning experience if you're interested in RSS.

    --
    Free, legal music for iTunes users.
  2. Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap by sporkmonger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nonsense. RSS doesn't have to be governed by a standards body for Apple's actions to be "wrong." The spec can be found at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss quite easily. And there's nothing stopping Apple from visiting http://feedvalidator.org/ to make sure their code works. They clearly didn't bother to do that.

    This isn't Apple bashing either. Many of the people who are most upset about this, myself included, are diehard Apple users.

    Apple screwed up photocasting, pure and simple. And they screwed up their podcasting spec too by releasing poorly designed specs (and I'm being generous here by calling their first attempt a "spec") and then changing things later. And they've made processing of some of their elements amazingly difficult. For instance, the itunes:keywords element can either be delimitted by commas or spaces. There's nothing in the xml itself to indicate for sure which you're dealing with, you just have to guess. Check if there's a comma present, if so, split by commas, otherwise, split by spaces. But what happens if they meant to use the single keyword "bad apple" instead of "bad", "apple"? There's no way to know for sure. The whole point of a spec is to avoid this kind of rediculous imprecision.

    So yeah, Apple doesn't seem to have the first clue about generating valid RSS or XML any of that stuff. And all they had to do was ask. Secrecy is not always your best friend.