Share Your OPML
Dave Winer has launched Share Your OPML to much fanfare.
The buzz reminded me of the Winer vs. Cadenhead contrempus several weeks back about a site to share OPML reading lists. The dispute has been settled, with Winer a clear winner IMO.
Time will tell how OPML survives the test of time. Cadenhead is unethusiastic:
[tease]
“…now that I’ve worked with it extensively, OPML’s an underspecified, one-size-fits-all kludge that doesn’t serve a purpose beyond the exchange of simple data. There’s little need for an XML dialect to represent outlines. Any XML format is a hierachy of parent-child relationships that could be editable as an outline with a single addition: a collapsed attribute that’s either true or false.
“Developers who build on OPML will encounter a lot of odd data because the format has been extended in a non-standard way. An outline item’s type attribute has a value that indicates the other attributes which might be present. No one knows how many different attributes are in use today, so if you tell users that your software “supports OPML,” you’re telling them you support arbitrary XML data that can’t be checked against a document type definition.”
[via techmeme]