Apple caught cheating on RSS standard

New iPhoto feature disregards standards

Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com 20 Jan 2006

The Photocasting feature in Apple's updated iPhoto application violates numerous internet standards, according to several dignitaries from the RSS community.

"Photocasting centres around a single undocumented extension element in a namespace that does not need to be declared," stated Mark Pilgrim, a software developer who conducted a number of tests in an effort to document the feature.

"IPhoto 6 does not understand the first thing about HTTP, the first thing about XML, or the first thing about RSS.

"It ignores features of HTTP that Netscape 4 supported in 1996, and mis-implements features of XML that Microsoft got right in 1997. It ignores 95 per cent of RSS and Atom and gets most of the remaining five per cent wrong."

Photocasting allows Mac users to share photos with friends and family. The feature will automatically upload the photos to a server and publish an RSS feed.

Other users subscribe to those feeds through iPhoto or a feed reader, allowing them to automatically receive updates when new photos are posted.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs claimed at the unveiling of the application last week that the feature adheres to the RSS standard.

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

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

"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.

"Assuming that [Apple's] intentions are good, and they're not trying to kill RSS, why don't they put some of us under [a non-disclosure agreement] and let us help them get the bugs out before they ship," he suggested.

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