There's no other way to put it other than the title. After having heard a lot about OPML (and having used it as a blind RSS feed exchange format), Ian Forrester's comment that he is using OPML for all his personal note-taking finally pushed me to look seriously at the format. It is just complete and utter garbage. OPML might possibly be the best example of the worst abuses of XML markup. It's really hard to fully express how horrible OPML is, and there is no way in the world that I'll ever be dealing with it directly. The language that I use as a hub for my personal information space needn't be perfect, but it can't make me gag at every other tag.
I looked a bit further and found
OML. It's a reaction to the
ugliness of OPML and so I expected it would be the ticket for me. It
does partially fix perhaps the most immediate and visceral abomination
of OPML: the abuse of attributes for prosaic textual content (although
why it doesn't completely eliminate the text attribute in favor of a
title child element is beyond me). But it leaves a lot of nastiness
and introduces some of its own (the idea of item as generic
extensibility element is hugely ill-begotten). OML isn't even
widely-used enough to just compromise and deal with its flaws. I think
I'll consider creating my own language. I can export to OPML via XSLT
when I really have to. But I think I can use some of the fixes in OML
as a starting point.
"Sharing, the web way", by Danny Ayers is a good outline [n/m] of the horrors of OPML. He does get into the politics as well, which I think are less important to me than the technical flaws. He does state what has always been my reaction to the OPML hype:
But more and more I'm thinking things like blogrolls or whatever are much better handled using something more specific - XBEL or simply (X)HTML (like Netscape bookmarks).
Of course I'd plump for XBEL, but this expresses my general viewpoint. I wanted to look at outlining formats because so many people go on about outline editors and formats as productivity tools. I want to be sure I'm not missing anything. Based on what I've found so far, I'm really confused at what people are gaining in this space.
Danny goes on to say:
If what you want is versatility and be able to combine material from different sources and of potentially different data types, then you really do need something like RDF - the glue of OPML isn't strong enough.
I think that O*ML is just one of those examples that illustrate the limits of RDF. RDF is not the best model for content with a significant prose quotient, and RDF/XML not the best syntax. I think that a format I came up with would have the following characteristics:
- Lightweight overall framework using other formats such as XBEL and XHTML 2.0 to do the heavy lifting
- Sound XML design overall
- Metadata sections that can readily be mapped to RDF model without using RDF/XML directly
Where would that take me that no one else has already charted? Maybe nowhere. I certainly wouldn't plan to spend much time on it (and I might not even bother at all). It's just a bit of exploration suggested to me by what I've found poking around what's there already.