Re: feed: URI assumed by Safari

Subject: Re: feed: URI assumed by Safari

From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>

Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:48:03 -0800

Delivered-to: email@hidden

On 27 Jan '06, at 9:06 AM, Lucas Gonze wrote:

it does not redirect to

feed://webjay.org/podcast/xml/shewolf/olppopsongs, nor does it make

any reference to such a bogus URI scheme.

Safari RSS uses the 'feed:' scheme to refer to RSS/Atom feeds. It may not be an IETF standard, but it's not 'bogus', and many other newsreaders use it. The spec is here:

http://www.brindys.com/winrss/feedformat.html

There's a sniffer in WebCore that recognizes when a document being loaded is RSS or Atom, and redirects to the equivalent 'feed:' URL. The Syndication framework installs its own handler for this protocol, which is what displays the Safari RSS feed pages, or other news-reader apps can register themselves and the URL will be sent to them.

Anyway, something seems to be going wrong inside our Syndication code; when we receive the request we can't identify the document as RSS or Atom.

2006-01-27 10:26:32.303 Safari[954] [PageLoad] Examining contents of <http://webjay.org/podcast/xml/shewolf/olppopsongs>...

2006-01-27 10:26:32.526 Safari[954] [PageLoad] ...No feed or link found

Probably a bug on our part. I'll have a look at it. The Content-Type header is almost certainly not the problem. We can't rely on it because it's so very often incorrect in the real world.

My wild guess as to what's happening here is that Safari is making
some assumption that the client should be the iTunes client and the
server *is* the iTunes store, but that's just a guess.

No, we don't redirect feeds to iTunes. A podcast would show up in Safari as a regular RSS feed; starting in 10.4.4 we show the enclosures as links so you could download them directly that way. To subscribe to the podcast in iTunes you have to tell iTunes to subscribe to it.

The impact of this bug is that Safari users are unable to subscribe to
podcasts from third party providers, so it's not a small problem.

That's not true. The convenient "Subscribe In ITunes" link may not appear, but to subscribe to the podcast, the user can copy the URL from the link and paste it into the "Subscribe To Podcast" dialog box in iTunes. (Remember, that ITunes link only got added a few weeks ago; in the stone ages before that, everyone had to subscribe through the iTunes dialog box.) I just did that, and iTunes is happily downloading MP3s now.

In any case, the impact of the bug is limited to one specific third party provider. Hopefully we can fix it and come up with a workaround for you. Stay tuned.

PS: Apple's developer website has a bug-reporter form for submitting things like this. Doing so saves bandwidth for the other developers on this mailing list.

___________________________________________

Jens Alfke — Social Software Introvert — Apple Computer

Getting bored is not allowed

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Follow-Ups:

Re: feed: URI assumed by Safari
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Re: feed: URI assumed by Safari
- From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>

References:

>feed: URI assumed by Safari (From: Lucas Gonze <email@hidden>)