"RSS community blasts Apple"

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Interesting link. Have you hear about Apples RSS being "tainted"?



http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/21...y-blasts-apple

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    Since RSS isnt a standard, Apple cant 'taint' it, they can add whatever they like.



    It just seems some RSS readers parse the Apple rss feeds wrongly, but thats probably the readers problem because Steve-J said their would be no problems.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    gene cleangene clean Posts: 3,481member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by T'hain Esh Kelch

    Since RSS isnt a standard, Apple cant 'taint' it, they can add whatever they like.



    Quote:

    We use industry standard RSS so that anyone can subscribe. You do not even need a Mac," he [Steve Jobs] told delegates at the Macworld conference in San Francisco.



    Quote:

    "It's pretty bad. There are lots of errors, the date formats are wrong, and there are elements that are not in RSS that are not in a namespace," said Dave Winer, who is considered the creator of RSS.



  • Reply 3 of 8
    jasenj1jasenj1 Posts: 923member
    FWIW, I do XML a LOT at my job - a whole lot.



    From the bit I read, the issue isn't just that iPhoto is a bad RSS citizen, it's a BAD - as in mockably, horribly bad - XML citizen. Apple uses XML all over the place in OS X. You'd think they'd know (and follow) the rules, standards, best practices, and conventions of XML.



    Those that care about such things are writing quite a bit about this. From what I've seen, the best that can be said is Apple did a lazy implementation that works "good enough". At worst, they intentionally ignored the relevant standards and conventions.



    For a company who touts "quality" as one of their selling points, it's a shame to see this sort of easily avoided thing happen.



    - Jasen.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    ionyzionyz Posts: 491member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by jasenj1

    For a company who touts "quality" as one of their selling points, it's a shame to see this sort of easily avoided thing happen.



    Probably a deadline issue, or they couldn't clean up code enough to give end-users the flexibility they need, or maybe still its not a high priority.



    Good example: I'm a web designer but if I needed to get some photos online fast with a nice setup I'd use iWeb, if I had time though I'd use iPhoto to select the good takes, open up Photoshop and ImageReady for tweaks and optimizing and then BBEdit and Trasmit to layout the design, code, and upload. If time is a factor and I'm not getting paid--my personal site--I'd use iWeb et al. otherwise I'd pound out a design.



    Its the same with cleaning up various blog templates to comply with accessibility guidelines, and what not. I can see both sides of the coin but it doesn't sound like Apple cleaned up the code at all from iWork HTML export.



    Note: I know this post has been more about HTML output quality with iLife apps but its comparative to syndication. What do I know, I write the syndication XML by-hand at my job hahaha.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    I think of the bad RSS use from Apple as the bad use of the web (ActiveX anyone?) from Microsoft. I think that Apple has a lot of buggy software. I used to be a mac user who always patch his computer as soon Apple post an update, now I wait. I had a lot of problems with systems updates, quicktime updates, iMovies updates, etc.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    Dave Winer is sort of the creator of RSS. And RSS is sort of a standard.



    The whole issue of the RSS "standard" (it is not one inasmuch as it is governed by any independent body) is much more complex than people realize.



    From this article: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html



    Quote:

    The name "RSS" is an umbrella term for a format that spans several different versions of at least two different (but parallel) formats. The original RSS, version 0.90, was designed by Netscape as a format for building portals of headlines to mainstream news sites. It was deemed overly complex for its goals; a simpler version, 0.91, was proposed and subsequently dropped when Netscape lost interest in the portal-making business. But 0.91 was picked up by another vendor, UserLand Software (Dave Winer), which intended to use it as the basis of its weblogging products and other web-based writing software.



    And...



    Quote:

    That's 7 -- count 'em, 7! -- different formats, all called "RSS". As a coder of RSS-aware programs, you'll need to be liberal enough to handle all the variations.



    This article has even more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)



    It is also my unerstanding that Dave Winer is one to speak about breaking compatibility, because (again, as I understand it) that's exactly what he did with his version of things.



    Now I don't know what is going on with Apple's photocasting RSS documents. I haven't played with it to see. I expect this is a defect issue not a "we're going to twist the standard" issue. It certainly sounds like it needs to be fixed and I expect it will be.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    andersanders Posts: 6,523member
    Just like the claim of the new iMac being four times faster than the old and 1000 people worked on the iMac and MBP, the claim of Photocasting observing "RSS standards", Jobs was just using RSS 1.0
  • Reply 8 of 8
    cosmonutcosmonut Posts: 4,872member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Anders

    Jobs was just using RSS 1.0



    ...coupled with RDF '06.
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