I posted this to an internal Tucows mailing list under the same subject line earlier today. I’m sufficiently miffed that I decided to repost it verbatim here.

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Subject: Apple sucks
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 09:43:03 -0500
From: Ross Rader <ross@tucows.com>
Reply-To: xxxxxx-internal <xxxxxx-internal@xxxxxx>
Organization: Tucows Inc.
To: xxxxxx-internal <xxxxxx-internal@xxxxxx>

Why do companies do this.

"Apple’s newly-released iPhoto 6 does an admirable job of making it easy for its users to publish feeds of their photos from their desktop. When Steve Jobs announced the product, he cited its use of “industry standard” RSS technology to make this posssible.

This all sounds great until you try to visit a photocasting feed in a browser other than Safari, or subscribe using a feed reader other than NetNewsWire. The site detects that you’re not using a photocast-capable client and displays an HTML page asking you to use Safari instead."

As with their stupid podcasting support in iTunes, Apple has diverged from accepted practices and done their own thing. Now, companies like Tucows, have to scramble to re-craft their perfectly good implementations in a non-standard way to accomodate a specific subset of users. Blogware already supports tags and enclosures....oh right...but iTunes did it different. Blogware already supports syndicated photo-albums...right again...Apple did it different.

I'm always extremely impressed when we get stuck fixing things that aren't broken instead of bringing real new value to our customers.

This has been the story with RSS, Blogware and blogging since day one...not happy with existing standards, the weblog development community have always decided to do their own thing. Its no surprise that now that Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo are at the table that they are doing the same thing.

Agh.

-ross
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