The wonderful world of Apple RSS

Here’s an example feed. You can’t read it in Firefox, and I haven’t been able to get NewsRiver to read it. They must look at the User-Agent header and only return if it’s their browser. Apparently it works with NetNewsWire. What are they doing at Apple?

Well, it’s not a User-Agent thing, it’s looking for a plugin, and it’s only present in Safari. The feed displays in Safari, but I haven’t been able to get a look at the XML source. To say this is somehow RSS is pretty wacky. Did Jobs really say it’s “industry standard,” as Engaget quotes him? I’d love to see some evidence of that.

Wait Phil Ringnalda spotted the url to the “real” feed.

http://web.mac.com/mrakes/iPhoto/photocast_test/index.rss

I couldn’t read that in my browser, so here’s a copy.

http://static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/rss.xml

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.

Engadget quoted Jobs as saying they were using “industry standard” RSS. Even if we used terminology like that (we don’t, there’s no standards body for RSS) one company can’t on its own say it’s standard, esp when it has so many mistakes in it. It’s a fairly damaging lie. Yeah, companies lie, I know — but then sometimes bloggers have to say they’re lying.

Assuming their intentions are good and they’re not trying to kill RSS, why don’t they put some of us under NDA and let us help them get the bugs out before they ship.

See Brent Simmons’s blog for more comments.