Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iLife, Bad Apple
Is Photocasting totally non-standard?
Not that Dave Winer is the
complaining type, just like Mossberg is a "tough critic," but Dave and Kevin Yank have been swimming around
in Apple's photocasting business. They didn't like what they saw. Remember
Jobs saying something about photocasting using "industry standard" RSS stuff? I remember that phrase
specifically, although I don't recall if it was regarding photocasting (I think it was). In fact, I remember looking at
my brother and thinking, "yeah right." The RDF shook off for a moment, because I know that Apple, while they
do love to look at standards, won't always adhere to a standard if they don't want to.In this case, looks like they took secrecy over compliance. Instead of asking someone like Winer (who would gladly hold his tongue if it's to promote a standard instead of break it), as there is no standards body for RSS, Apple just kinda forged their own standard. Yeah, it uses standards in the same way I use the military: I'm glad they are there, but I never joined up. Basically the RSS is so screwed up the only way to read the feeds is to use Safari.
The full details of what is broken is over at this unofficial documentation of iPhoto 6.0 photocasting feeds. Dave Winer has his words, witty as always, and Kevin Yank winds up saying what some are thinking: "Apple is the new Microsoft." Although I would like to point out that that unofficial documentation goes to Apple lists, and I have a feeling they are going to look at this. Heck, they might even fix it! So next year I'll gladly pay another $79 for XML that "just works."
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Matt said 2:51PM on 1-18-2006
iPhoto seems to be able to subscribe to rss feeds with photos in them. Subscribing to the tuaw rss feed ( feed://www.tuaw.com/rss.xml ) in iPhoto will have all the photos show up. I tried it with flickr too and it works but the flickr rss feed only has small images as opposed to full size ones. Maybe we could get flickr to offer full size images in rss feeds for photocasting ...
Reply
ephraimephraim said 2:53PM on 1-18-2006
The year was 1984. I worked at Wang Laboratories, famous for Wang Word Processing. One of my co-workers went to Apple to look at porting WWP and Wang networking to the newly-released Macintosh. And when he came back he said to me, "These guys don't have an industry-standard bone in their bodies."
Reply
Chris Karr said 3:35PM on 1-18-2006
The RSS that iPhoto ingests is non-standard from the perspective of trying to write generators for the content. I made an attempt to generate an RSS feed containing all my Flickr content, but I was foiled by the fact that Apple uses no less than three date formats in photocasting RSS feeds. I managed to figure out the first two without any problem, but the actual date that matters - the one that stores the date the photo was taken - was completely incomprehensible to me.
If anyone can translate 2018.868993 as a date for me, I'd appreciate it.
Further, to compound the problem, I was unable to find any documentation about the extensions to the RSS feeds. At least when they expanded RSS with the itunes: namespace, they provided a nice document explaining all the tags.
I'm not one to frequently agree with Dave Winer, but in this case he is right - Apple's bungled the deployment of photocasting by doing their own thing and reinventing the wheel so that Jobs would have something completely new to talk about during a keynote instead of doing it right the first time and working with the community when they were unsure about how to do something. I love being surprised by shiny new things at the Stevenotes as much as anyone else, but this whole problem is silly and could have been avoided.
And don't get me started with the whole page redirection thing when you try to retrieve a photocast RSS feed and you're not using iPhoto or Safari...
Reply
Chris Karr said 3:40PM on 1-18-2006
I found out the date thing after reading Mark Pilgrim's documentation. "The number of days after Jan. 1, 2000"? WTF?
Reply
Al Lang said 4:51PM on 1-18-2006
Oh, please. Winer doesn't like it because he doesn't control it. Which is pretty much the reason that the RSS world is a farcical mass of contradictory wannabe-standards and hopelessly incompatible implementations. (In fact, that's why all the smart knowledgeable people in the field who aren't turned on by RSS politics went off to invent Atom.)
Meanwhile, let's focus on getting what we want: bash Apple for the complicated crappy incompatible stuff that makes our lives harder and praise them when they do nice compatible stuff that makes our lives better.
(But perhaps we should cut them a little slack, realising that in the RSS world it's pretty much impossible to be genuinely compatible with anything.)
Reply
Al Lang said 4:52PM on 1-18-2006
Oh, please. Winer doesn't like it because he doesn't control it. Which is pretty much the reason that the RSS world is a farcical mass of contradictory wannabe-standards and hopelessly incompatible implementations. (In fact, that's why all the smart knowledgeable people in the field who aren't turned on by RSS politics went off to invent Atom.)
Meanwhile, let's focus on getting what we want: bash Apple for the complicated crappy incompatible stuff that makes our lives harder and praise them when they do nice compatible stuff that makes our lives better.
(But perhaps we should cut them a little slack, realising that in the RSS world it's pretty much impossible to be genuinely compatible with anything.)
Reply
Dan Pourhadi said 5:31PM on 1-18-2006
Winer does nothing but complain.
Reply
R Muffet said 5:35PM on 1-18-2006
I'm not going to take sides in this, but some points to note in the mostly irrational comments floating around:
1. RSS 2.0 defines a set of tags, which form the "standard." Apple adheres to these tags.
2. All XML documents allow a namespace (the definition of XML is EXTENSIBLE Markup Language). Apple uses a namespace for its custom tags. Aggregators which don't know about namespace tags are MEANT to ignore them.
3. Web browsers per se are not things used to read RSS files, because they are not web pages. That is the role of an aggregator. Some modern browsers (Safari, Firefox) incorporate aggregators, which confuses the issue.
4. The browser test redirection is intended to take Mac users who surf to a URL to iPhoto to subscribe to the feed, which is primarily what the Apple definition "Photocasting" is (I feel it should have been called "iPhotocasting.") I may be wrong, but I assume it was never intended for browsers to access to feed directly.
5. All aggregators I have seen handle the RSS feed just fine, and collect the enclosed photos as expected.
6. Dave Winer is working with Microsoft to craft extensions to RSS to include two way communication. Unless a new version of RSS is opened (RSS 3.0?), then these extensions will have to take the form of namespaces, and exactly the same issues will be involved, only this time it's Microsoft doing it. There is more than a touch of politics to this.
7. If you've read his blog for any length of time (since 1996 for me), you'll know that Dave Winer has an intense, emotional, and almost pathological tendency to draw conclusions which border on the paranoid. Dave fans love him for this; Dave observers tend to roll their eyes.
8. Dave Winer is perpetually jealous of anyone who dares to use RSS in a way he has not personally vetted. This is despite the fact that he derived the RSS concept format from specifications originally invented by Netscape, but feels the sole ownership is morally his because he popularized it so effectively. Add point #7, and you've got the makings of the syndication equivalent of World War III..! Anyone sensible will keep their distance.
Reply
Chris Karr said 7:08PM on 1-18-2006
R Muffet, some thoughts:
Re. 2: Apple's not even using XML properly if you read Mark Pilgrim's notes. It's looking for prefixes and not even checking if the prefix is declared in a namespace. Thus, it's possible to create photocasts that work in iPhoto, but make any other app using a real XML parser fail. Not a good thing...
Re. 4: That's fine until I build a photocast reader that is not iPhoto or Safari. I paste the URL into my own reader and it doesn't work because Apple is returning an HTML page instead of an RSS document. If iPhoto is to be the only photocasting client, that's fine. Otherwise, it's f'ed up.
Reply
phlavor said 8:32PM on 1-18-2006
When I asked an Apple rep at Macworld if photocasting required .Mac he said yes then the conversation turned into a .Mac sales pitch. He made a lot of good points and I do think it's worth it but
a. a lot of people are giving it away
b. I don't like Apple nerfing their products to sell other products/services.
c. I like intergration between software but not interdependency. Microsoft went to court over that and Apple should learn from that mistake.
Reply