Apple’s latest software bundle wraps RSS together with photo-publishing and they call it “Photocasting”. Reasonable enough. Dave Winer and Kevin Yank have pointed out that there are some real problems with the RSS. So Mark Pilgrim did a deep-dive and it’s not just bad, it’s spectacularly bad. To quote Mark: To sum up, the “photocasting” feature centers around a single undocumented extension element in a namespace that doesn’t need to be declared. iPhoto 6 doesn’t 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% of RSS and Atom and gets most of the remaining 5% wrong. This is really hard to understand. [Update: The mob howling at Apple may have been a bit over-excited; check out Sam Ruby’s careful and balanced look at the situation, including the follow-up comments. And I apologize for leaping to conclusions; those with painful knowledge of the history of syndication politics will perhaps understand why, when the people listed at the top of this entry are all saying the same thing, one might assume that it’s probably true.]
