I know, you’ve been hearing all this stuff about how OPML is good, or OPML is bad, or OPML is a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, inside an enigma. Well, come on now folks, OPML r001z! It just needs a few uh, improvements here and there…
Is there an OPML Validator? Yes, though it’s hard to find, not properly named, or documented very well, and there appears to be no source available… What we need is something as well put together as the Feed Validator, including source code under an open-source license.
Is there an OPML Spec? Yes, though it’s not been revised in over 5 years, and perhaps it should be, as it things have changed and we’ve learned much since then, what with the utf-8 and the &persands and what not…
Is there a DTD? Yes, well, for OPML 1.0. Of course the validator also supports OPML 1.1, of course the Spec is for OPML 1.0, so, um, yeah…
OPML seems to be “sort of” “kind of” there, but not quite. Clean up everything, look at RSS, Atom, OML and any other XML formats you can think of, figure out what OPML might be lacking, add it in there, provide a good, easy-to-use & easy-to-find validator, and we can all stop stepping on puppies when we use OPML.
I know, you the reader are left wondering why I don’t do all of the things I mentioned above? Well dear reader, I don’t do such things. What I do though, is deal with the formats that people create years after they become popular, I mean, you’ve heard the phrase "XML that isn’t really XML" right? Well, I’d just like to make sure I don’t hear "XML that isn’t really XML" any more before I’m told to start writing code that has to produce and consume OPML…
But what do I know? I’m not a user or a developer, I’m just a hacker…