I was browsing the iTunes Music Store the other day, and I was thinking; the iTunes Music Store must be a system of XML feeds stored in some far off web server–Apple just forces you to view the XML in iTunes. That thinking got me thinking some more. There must be a way to browse the iTMS in a web browser. So, I started off by opening iTunes and getting a URL. I took the following Saturday Night Live link:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/
viewCustomPage?name=pageSNL&ign-mscache=1
(Broken into two lines for a narrower display here.) Well and good. Type that into your web browser, and you've got iTunes opening the SNL page. So, I tried to circumvent this automagic opening of iTunes; I popped open the OS X Terminal application and typed the following:
curl "http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/\
wa/viewCustomPage?name=pageSNL&ign-mscache=1"
curl is just a way of downloading the source code of a specified page, for those of you who don't know. It worked, and returned the source code for the page. I skimmed the JavaScript functions in the source, and went to the bottom section of the code. When the body loads, a URL is opened in iTunes. I copied and pasted the first link I found there into Safari. As expected, it opened in iTunes, obviously, as the protocol is itms://; why not just change it to http://?
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060111131007980