Apple do something good with Itunes store?

Adam sent me a couple of links the other day, following our nice saturday night get together in central London.

The link to iTunes RSS site:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/MRSS/rssGenerator

Now feel the power of the mac come to you Ian, with Rendezvous
Executable for PocketPC 2003:
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/rendezvous/

Go on, you know you want to try it! You it makes sense 😉

My reply goes something like this…
Alright alright I'm mildly impressed with Apple.
The rendez-vous client could be useful, but your still playing with the limits of battery power and non-sync connections over bluetooth and less so wifi. I dont think Rendez-fool /images/emoticons/happy.gif was made for such connections? Dont know enough on this issue…

Anyway the RSS generator – Yeah this is useful. Cant quite work out there Url scheme. But not looked at it enough really. Something like Amazon's A9.com would be sweet…

Using RSS2.0 – sweet, am option for RDF would be equally nice, but easy to convert from RSS2 to RDF using XSLT. Sure Atom wouldn’t be much of a challenge either. Really need to write the xsl's soon, as the BBC also requires something like this for RSS 0.91 to others.

Good use of standard namespaces rather than making there own, unlike others I've seen recently. Would be interested to see what else is inside the itms modules though.

BUT, what the hell is going on with the content:encoded elements!
TABLES in a RSS Feed? Surely the point of RSS is to syndicate not force your style on other services? XML with style, not a good idea at all, and I would usually go into a rant about how Apple always do something like this. Tease us with applications and services which claim to be standard complient and all, till you look a little deeper and find a flaw. Think Microsoft WordprocessingML! I would gladly rip out all that crap soon as possible if I was working on it.

Generally this work has to be supported with clap of hands and a happy smile. Keep it up Apple. Sure the BBC would be interested in doing something very simular some point soon. Although I would prefer something a little more like XMLTV or something from Kendra.

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Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io