While many of us beef about Microsoft always wanting to do things their own way, this time, Apple plays the rebel. David Utter of WebProNews (links below) writes about Apple's new photocasting feature.

According to the article, the photocasting feature lets you build an RSS feed consisting of photographs. You have to use iPhoto to create the feed, but Apple claims you can read the feed with any RSS reader.

So what's the problem? Apparently, that claim is untrue. Apple's photocasting uses an undocumented extension for RSS. On the other hand, some users claim that their feed reader has no problems with iPhoto photocasts.

The surprising thing about this is that photocasting can already be performed with RSS 2.0 as it stands. (Possibly in Atom as well, although I am not as technically knowledgeable yet with this XML feed format.)

If you want to see an example of photocasting in action, check out Weblogsinc.com's Autoblog RSS feed (links below). I haven't tried it in all RSS readers, but the ones I have tried seem to function fine.

The way Autoblog does it is to use the XML "CDATA" (character data) element within the "Description" element to "escape" special content. In this case, <![CDATA[...]]> is used to properly handle full XHTML markup, including <img> (image) references.

While Autoblog's feed also has text in it, you could very well remove the Description text to have a pure photocast. On the other hand, as I mention in my tip to promote photographers and other visual artists, you could leave the text in in a photocast to provide info about camera settings (or art materials) used for each image.

Now, a tool to produce an Autoblog-like photocast would be nice for anyone who doesn't want to have to view raw XML. Maybe Apple will get on the ball and do that for the next version of iPhoto. Or maybe someone already has such a tool and I haven't yet come across it.

Links:  WebProNews - David Utter - Apple Runs Afoul of RSS Pros., Weblogs Inc Autoblog and RSS feed.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

Technorati Tags: rsscases, rss cases, photocasting, web feeds, content syndication, Apple iPhoto