<P>It's <A href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/">been</A> <A href="http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/07/05/Insensitive-iTunes">reported</A> that iTunes is lax in parsing the RSS extensions that they added to support iTunes.</P> <P>In a nutshell, the way iTunes finds the nodes it needs in an RSS document is apparently by scanning through the document doing a case-insensitive compare of the node name to the name it's looking for. </P> <P>XML is case-sensitive, so what most people do (an XPath query for /rss/channel for example) will not find nodes that the iTunes parser will find.</P> <P>The danger is that iTunes could become so popular that users will only test with it.&nbsp; </P> <P>The precedent for this is Internet Explorer.&nbsp; It accepts some pretty bizarre creations and tries its best to work with them.&nbsp; Now that IE has been doing this for so long and so many sites depend on IE side-effects, that they've become the defacto standard, and folks like Mozilla have to work hard to emulate the bad parsing that IE does.</P> <P>Hopefully all the attention this is getting now will get Apple to make their parser more strict, although it will mean breaking things in the short term.</P> <P>&nbsp;</P>Thu, 01 Sep 2005 19:17:09 GMT