Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Apple eXtending RSS

RSS inventor slams Apple's podcast approach "Extending a standard is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. The "X" in "XML" does continue to stand for "Extensible." Conceivably, Apple could have made an open proposition for an extension to media RSS that supports the iTunes catalog, stated Louis, and RSS developers could have worked with them to polish a standard prior to iTunes 4.9's release. But by redefining the meaning of at least two principal RSS tags, by Winer's count, Apple may be, in Louis' opinion, trying too hard to re-invent the wheel just so the final product can be theirs and theirs alone. The situation is reminiscent, said Louis, of the browser wars of the 1990s "where basically you could develop your own tags that could work on your own browser, but then there was no guarantee that the community would support those.""

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