iTunes Music Store XML

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2004/04/21]

ARGH.  The XML used in Apple's iTunes Music Store is already verbose as 
hell (which has it's benefits for them in flexibility of layout, so I'll 
let it slide), but what I can't figure out is why, oh why, they had to 
use markup like the following...

<dict>
   ...
   <key>kind</key><string>song</string>
   <key>artistName</key><string>Hank Dogs</string>
   <key>artistId</key><string>2730069</string>
   <key>bitRate</key><integer>128</integer>
   ...
</dict>

Why aren't they properly using attributes... or even nesting the values 
as a child of the key?!  How much harder would it be to generate 
something sane like:

<value key="kind" type="string">song</value>

or heck, even

<key>
   kind
   <string>song</string>
</key>

But no.  They can't do that.  It's hate.  Pure hate.  It means, for the 
most part, assuming that the next element after a key element is its value.

And I can't imagine why they would do it that way.  Surely it makes it 
more difficult to parse and is more prone to breakage.  I mean, what gives?

</rant>

• iTunes Music Store XML Thomas R. Sibley 02:26 on 21 Apr 2004
  • Re: iTunes Music Store XML Daniel Pittman 09:08 on 21 Apr 2004
    • too deep to show
  • Geoff Richards 09:39 on 21 Apr 2004
  • peter (Peter da Silva) 12:48 on 21 Apr 2004
  • Yoz Grahame 16:15 on 21 Apr 2004

Generated at 14:02 on 01 Jul 2004 by mariachi 0.52