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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.'"
I know there are plenty of RSS Validation tools out there that will go to a website and tell you whether or not the RSS Feed is valid based on current standards but what about for applications?
What does Dave Winer (or anyone who works with RSS daily) recommend we use to validate applications and websites? What's the best tool to quickly and efficiently evaluate our work in parsing and assembling RSS?
I've used nifty tools like XML Spy for validating XML and XSD forms and I was wondering if there is an equivalent for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 formats.
My work here is dung.
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.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
...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.
Perhaps Microsoft can send them a few developers to help out? Together, I'm sure they can really mess it all up :)
Get your own free personal location tracker
[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*...
the layman's guide to computer science
Not real surprising. I was all excited that iTunes had an XML export facility for the library, until I saw it.
I'd expected to apply some kind of transformation to the document to make it suit my needs, but this was tragic. It was painfully obvious that whoever wrote the export didn't even remotely "get" it. It was some horrid hodgepodge of tags all slapped together around what amounted to a CVS dump. It was well formed, basically useless as an XML document.
I'd have been happier is the export was a simple delimited file or even a binary dump, at least it would have been smaller.
RSS fubar? Yep, they still have the same people doing their XML. Let hope this makes them rethink that...
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.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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:
c asting-Hyperbole/
- 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/Photo
The whole flap is quite a learning experience if you're interested in RSS.
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
I was about to compliment you for your metric conversion, then decided to see for myself to guess at your source, but...
800 pounds = 362.873896 kilograms
Correct to 6 decimal places is funny; being off by more than 3 kg isn't... Use the power of Google, people!
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
damn, i used my brain cells with 2.2 pounds ~ 1.0 Kg,
so that made it 800 lbs / 2.2 or kinda 400 / 1.1,
1 over 11 is 9.090909..., so its 360+3.6+.36, so oops
I erred in my head, I should have had 363.(63)* repeating, which would have been DAMN closer. Damn the power of brainware. Who taught this AI system??? But hey, it was just a side-bar in a comment, and close enough is close enough for a commentary. It's not like I was scheduling a fly-by for Saturn's moons or anything.
Or perhaps Apple's diet made it a little leaner, yeah, yeah, that's the ticket. I was commenting on how it STILL is not quite a complete 800 lb gorilla. Yeah, that's what I meant!
And, as Mark Pilgrim's original email which is the basis of TFA points out, Apple haven't even implemented XML namespace support correctly.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Let's all call it "Apple Simple Syndication (ASS)" and see what happens.
rewriting history since 2109
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
Apple has always been more about making a big splash in the media with some technology than about releasing something solid and fully tested. This is the sort of thing that should have been found in beta testing, but then Apple's never been too big on doing that because it might spoil their "one more thing" at the next Steve Jobs keynote. Better to fix it after it's in the wild than risk a leak to the media. I'm not the only one questioning their quality control. There are lots of others. Just look at the mess they've made of font management in OS X. It's causing graphic designers no end of problems. The really bad part of this is that the kind of people who'll be using this application will be less-technical users who won't know why violating these standards is a bad thing and wouldn't be able to fix it if they did know. For a company that once had the best quality control and the best operating system, they've sure gone downhill. Sadly, Apple isn't learning the right lesson because their sales (thanks largely due to the iPod) are doing well and the Mac Faithful seem willing to live with the flaws just because "it's a Mac".
"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," said Winer.
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.
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.