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Apple Breaks RSS with Photocasting
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jan 20, 2006 11:24 AM
from the watch-where-you're-putting-those-tags dept.
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.'"
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RSS Validation Utility? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:RSS Validation Utility? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:RSS Validation Utility? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Wow, Dave Winer whines about Apple?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:RSS Validation Utility? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, livejournal.com and sun's java developer RSS feeds are both invalid from an XML perspective. I can't parse sun's feed IN JAVA using the XML parser. Now thats sad. Some guy probably created a servlet (intern?) that does like out.println or something.. No validator should probably display either feed since its not XML friendly. That would mean the feed fails when the developer tests it and then this can never happen. Apple's safari implementation is VERY loose on invalid RSS feeds which in turn causes their developers to make this invalid feed. I think its safe to say apple tested it with their own browser. Wouldn't you?
Obviously, one could write their own parser for an RSS feed without relying on the fact its XML and treat it like an HTML 2.0 document. You know.. write your own parser, don't assume documents are valid.. everything XML was supposed to save us from.
I don't know about others, but when i generate XML documents I often find it difficult to know what characters are safe to escape, etc. & for example is a pain in the ass as are . If you escape them like the suggested escape for iso latin1 < then you are using an ampersand. Oh no... Sometimes parsers react to ' and " as well.
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Re:RSS Validation Utility? (Score:3, Informative)
<element attrib="this is "my" text"/>
Without the escapes, that attribute value will fail to parse correctly, since the text appears to end halfway through the string.
Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never happen (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:3, Interesting)
It isn't something that should be fixed in the next patch, because it wasn't something that should have gotten past QA.
A problem with the readers or with Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 affecte
Re:A problem with the readers or with Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:A problem with the readers or with Apple? (Score:3, Interesting)
What a ridiculous analogy. You can't stop earthquakes from happening easily. But you can stop your software from emitting malformed documents easily.
That's why it's so important that all XML parsers throw out malformed documents. Even Apple's.
Re:A problem with the readers or with Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
You would if the earthquakes were being created by the civil engineers in the next Office. Especially if it was because the civil engineers in the next Office were incompetent.
Go read what XML was designed for.
Re:A problem with the readers or with Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple fanatics will find an excuse for ANYTHING apple does.
Sorry for the flamebait, but it's true... every time I see something written about Apple doing something wrong... and they do... they spin it around to look like it's someone elses fault, or it's just plain good.
With users like that, Apple really doesn't need a PR department.
Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:5, Insightful)
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'.
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Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:4, Informative)
And, as Mark Pilgrim's [diveintomark.org] original email [apple.com] which is the basis of TFA points out, Apple haven't even implemented XML namespace support correctly.
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Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:3, Informative)
No, it allows the inclusion of HTML that has been escaped according to XML syntax rules. The way you are talking, it sounds as if you think you can just put HTML in directly. This is not the case. RSS is XML.
By the way, Atom also allows you to do this - check out things like <content type="html">. That's exactly how RSS handles HTML inclusion.
Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, please. Pre-1.0 is so last millennium. Beta is the new hotness now.
It's Web 2.0 baby - get on the bus!
Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm reluctant to attribute incompetence to anything that can be as easily attributed to premature release (for sales/marketing reasons).
I have little doubt an Apple developer is saying "Yup, it isn't finished, and it's a piece of crap. I know it, but I had twenty minutes until we started stamping CD's. I've got it patched, but it won't be released for a few weeks."
In other words, I'm reluctant to blame
Re:Wow, a 1.0 release is buggy? This has never hap (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you thing the world will change its way of handling RSS due to Apples implementation of photocasting? I guess some readers will accept Apples RSS misbehavior as an alternative to be compatible, like web browsers accept shitty HTML pages. But most will not. If they even care (Apple is still a dwarf in the RSS world), they will simply wait if this will not be fixed in a couple of we
Instead of assuming the worst... (Score:4, Insightful)
- http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphoto.html [apple.com]
- http://bugreport.apple.com/ [apple.com] (trackable, but requires free Apple Developer Connection account [apple.com])
[1] Strictly speaking Apple is not doing anything wrong. [...] anybody can make changes and introduce new elements and extensions.
Re:Instead of assuming the worst... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Instead of assuming the worst... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe they will be.
And maybe Apple will finally properly implement the ID3V2 tag standards -- they use a non-compliant tag (TCMP is not a valid ID3V2 tag, and they use it on all "compilation" albums; there are many other tags that could be used instead and still comply with the standard) in all of their implementations and their ID3V2.4 implementation is completely fucked.
An
I doubt they're trying to be malicious. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Microsoft to the rescue? (Score:5, Funny)
Summary of TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Summary of TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds practical.
Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably will see iPhoto 6.0.1 around the corner, in the meantime.
Re:Apple (Score:4, Funny)
800 pounds = 362.873896 kilograms [google.com]
Correct to 6 decimal places is funny; being off by more than 3 kg isn't... Use the power of Google [google.com], people!
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brain cell misfire: add more caffeine, try again. (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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Jumping the gun (Score:4, Insightful)
Methinks they prostest *too much*...
Do it right baby, yeah! (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe someone should send them a copy of 'The Joy of Sex?'
I find this odd... (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple XML Challenged (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Apple XML Challenged (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, it's an amazingly crappy XML format -- it's a wonderful example of what not to do with XML.
That said, it's in plist xml format -- if you can find a library that knows how to deal with plists (in XML), then you're set. Any decent library will transform it into something more useful. I found a decent plist parser for python [shearersoftware.com] that works on top of SAX. I'm still playing around with it, but it's a lot less work than rei
Winer is not a reliable source (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
metamatic is not a reliable source (Score:3, Interesting)
So here it is not surprising that he has chosen to attack Winer rather than evaluate the merit of Winer's statements.
Oh yeah, if you are reading Dave--thanks for RSS and OPML :-)
Re:metamatic is not a reliable source (Score:3, Informative)
If you really want to see my first publically posted criticism of Dave Winer and his software pricing, you'll have to go back to at least 1992 [google.com]. Nice try, though.
Perhaps you missed the bit about how Dave Winer did not in fact invent RSS--he co-opted Netscape's invention and pretended it was his own.
I guess he has sycophants, just like he has enemies. I just think he' [xciv.org]
From the perspective of an RSS neophyte (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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.
We're Apple (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, we're Apple! Whatever we do is by definition Right. Now go change the standard to conform.
New Standard (Score:5, Funny)
Doesn't surprise me... (Score:4, Interesting)
Crackers and cheese, anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Watch where you put that hyperbole... (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, seriously. I, for one, am outraged that Apple has merely made mistakes in implementation, and is not making deliberate attempts to hijack an open standard. It just doesn't get any worse than that.
Re:Standards? Who needs standards! (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, interpretation of standards can cause problems, too. Often times what appears to be a broken application is just a matter of other applications it must interact with not fo