Apple called out on iPhoto’s RSS incompatibility
Also on Arstechnica:
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“Apple recently unveiled iphoto 6, which contains a new feature called Photocasting. Essentially, Photocasting is a way to publish and share photos in the same way that a blog shares words (or Flickr shares photos). All well and good—different product, similar goal. But note the following tidbit from the Apple web site:
...if Aunt Sophia doesn’t have iphoto or she has a computer that runs Windows, she can still subscribe to your Photocasts via any RSS-compatible browser or RSS reader.
Turns out, this claim of RSS compatibility isn’t entirely true. In user tests, Photocasts have been demonstrated to work nicely in Safari, but result in error in Firefox and Opera. Similarly, some dedicated RSS clients can display Photocasts, while others can’t. What’s going on? Software developer Mark Pilgrim has called Apple out on the software and its RSS compatibility.
...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.
That’s fairly strong stuff, but don’t take his word for it. Dave Winer, one of the creators of RSS, has also noted iphoto’s incompatibilities…(more…)