Re: Feed List Format

> And supporting a new format would definitely require more work than
> hooking into an already supported format. If I have a function call that
> already parses OPML, I don't need to do anything else.

The biggest problem is it's inability to use anything other than attributes.
There are some things that just won't work in that manner.  Were it to have been
structured to support a more container-like entity there'd be some hope.  But
it's not and as an outliner format it doesn't need to change.

Although, God forbid, one could graft some RDF attributes inside the soup and
potentially leverage out of it's inane straightjacket.  I'm sure both camps
would have seizures seeing THAT sort of hack.

> The more work that is required to implement the functionality (both on
> the consumer and producer sides), the fewer sites and clients will
> support it.

Quite right and as a prime source of RSS feed data I'm interested in being able
to have Syndic8 publish as much /useful/ data as is possible.  I'm stating the
OPML is insufficient for this and that I'd like to open the door to others in
developing an alternative.  We've been ruminating on this for quite some time.
Now that there's a diversity of reader programs there's potential for growth.

The impact on existing readers is quite likely to be negligble.  If anything,
let's keep an eye toward structuring the data such that it lends itself to
something like a *very* easy XSLT template.  Should something be unable to
handle it in native form then we can just run a proxy that transcodes it back
into the dumbed-down opml form.

-Bill Kearney



 

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