I've added some background information about the purpose of the spec,
and best practices for filing bugs. In addition, I've captured the
earlier exchange about <itunes:block>.
The earlier exchange says case-insensitive. The page you created says
case-sensitive.
Whoops -- my bad, sorry. Fixed.
Let me rephrase the above more constructively. I believe that the
combination of clear specifications, plentiful samples that exemplify
best practices, an easy to use online validator is something that will
benefit everybody.
Fair enough. I've added a link to your validator to the FAQ.
Let's work together to improve on this. For starters, I would like to
request that Apple consider limiting the "Featured Podcasts" on http://www.apple.com/podcasting/ to ones that exemplify the best
practices that Apple would like to see in feeds. Note: I am not
trying
to dictate what these best practices are, I am merely offering to help
make them a reality.
An interesting suggestion, I'll pass it along.
Suggestion: run the feeds through the Feed Validator. The Feed
Validator is open source, and also has a bug tracking system. If the
errors produced are unclear, misleading, or outright wrong, let us
know.
Thanks, I appreciate that. For that matter, I'd welcome a FAQ entry
on "Best practices for validating feeds".
Meanwhile, I have questions that aren't clearly bugs, though I am
willing to record them as such if you prefer. For example:
Can categories be anything the producer wants them to be, or must
they
be in a predefined list? If the latter, where can I find the list?
Is that something we could discuss?
Actually, let me see if I can summarize the Top Three Requests:
1. Definitive, real-world examples of proper usage of itunes tags
2. Web-accessible list of valid categories (and how to properly
encode them)
3. Description of the 'fallback' behavior for extracting metadata
from untagged feeds
and, implicitly, an updated spec that incorporates all of these.
I'm sure there's more, but rather than try to do everything at once,
I prefer to focus on getting the most urgent questions answered
first. I appreciate your assistance in ensuring we're setting the
appropriate priorities.
Thanks again,
-- Ernie P.
P.S. In case it isn't clear, I'm just the XML Marketing guy. I need
to find and work with the relevant Smart People at Apple to get the
relevant information and make it available, which is why there's
usually a delay. Whatever information I have, I do post as quickly
as possible. For the rest, all I can do is ask for your patience.
