But it looks like Apple took matters into their own hands and extended RSS for podcasting. Their own extensions. On their own.

Danny Ayers caught it - so did Dare Obasanjo.

So this is what happens when we leave things to evolve - on their own. Clearly podcasting was something that needed meta-data - so Apple just went and did it. Their own namespace.

On their own.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Dare puts it perfectly:

This sounds interesting. So now developers of RSS readers that want to consume podcasts have to know how to consume the RSS 2.0 element, Yahoo!’s extensions to RSS and Apple’s extensions to RSS to make sure they cover all the bases. Similarly publishers of podcasts also have to figure out which ones they want to publish as well.

I guess all that’s left is for Real Networks and Microsoft to publish their own extensions to RSS for dealing with providing audio and video metadata in RSS feeds to make it all complete. This definitely complicates my plans for adding podcasting support to RSS Bandit. And I thought the RSS 1.0 vs. RSS 2.0 vs. Atom discussions were exciting. Welcome to the world of syndication.

Finally as Danny says:

So, in summary it’s a bit of a proprietary thing, released as a fait accompli. Ok if you’re targetting for iTunes, for anything else use Yahoo! Media RSS. I wonder where interop went.

I agree with Danny -let’s support Brad Horowitz, David Hall and the Yahoosters on this one. We just need to make mRSS our own and not let it seem like Yahoo owns and controls it.

Can you imagine Flickr APIs for audio and video.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 8:02 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.