Eye on Winer

Dave thinks of RSS as one format to rule them all. He wants everyone to use RSS (and not ATOM!) so that everything works together. But is he displaying a new form of hypocrisy with the AP photos feed?

Looking at the comments to a recent post here at EOW you can see that some odd things are afoot.

For starters, a commenter found the AP feed and started using it without FlickrFan. He posted about that here on EOW. Shortly thereafter, the photo feed stopped being updated… but FlickrFan kept getting new pictures. How? Dave changed the address of the feed and rolled out an update silently to FlickrFan clients.

Security through obscurity.

Furthermore, it was noticed that the reason that so many RSS readers were having problems reading this raw feed was due to malformed HTTP URLs, in violation of the RSS spec. Essentially, Dave was using an encrypted URL (albeit a very weak encryption) which required an algorithm (albeit a very simple one) to read the URLs. Some readers did that by default, some did not. In either case, though, the feed was not properly formed RSS (by the spec).

Once that little catch was posted here at EOW, the feed mysteriously changed again. This time with more variations on the “http://” part of the URL… he changed the encryption algorithm.

Is he doing this to make sure that iPhoto can never read his feeds? Is he doing it to break third-party photo-downloaders? Are these just typos?

It’s hard to tell, but one thing is certain: what Dave is putting out is not well-formed RSS. If he’s borking the RSS to break other readers… isn’t that a little hypocritical?