Dave Winer: Apple improves their namespace docs.
Randy: The changes clear up inconsistencies in their documents, but still doesn't impress me. It looks like the future of media RSS extensions are being defined by people that can barely write XML, neither mind valid RSS and very far from good RSS. The biggest problem remains their funky <itunes:category> which seems to be a proprietary tag that doesn't do anything that can't already be done with the regular old <category> element. This was already raised in several forums and they seem to have decided to ignore the communities advice. Here's a specific example from their specification.
<!-- iTunes Browse Podcasts Category -->
<itunes:category text="Technology">
<!-- iTunes Browse Podcasts Subcategory -->
<itunes:category text="Gadgets"/>
</itunes:category>
This should be rewritten using the regular old RSS 2.0 <category> element.
<category domain="iTunes">Technology/Gadgets</category>
You're right, of course. But I can't get worked up about categorisation because I believe that is the province of the reader, not the provider. I support categorisation in my Agg, but I leave it to the reader to categorise their own feeds. Sure, it makes sense for a provider to categorise the feeds they provide to help people select the ones they want but when the feeds move into the reader's domain it's the reader who is best placed to categorise them.
My two pence,
Andy Henderson