Then why not use RSS, or Atom, or CSV, or HTML, for that matter?
That OPML "outline" has no tree structure at all, except for the single top level container item:
<outline title="HN Personal Blogs" text="HN Personal Blogs">
What is the point of using OPML for a flat structure?
Outlines are all well and fine, but a list of links to blogs is hardly an outline.
And isn't JSON the simplest most ubiquitous accessible standard format for outlines and even arrays of links these days, if not just raw-dogging XML?
More thoughts and opinions and history of OPML, RSS, Dave Winer, More, Frontier, Manila, Radio UserLand, XML-RPC, SOAP, Xanadu, spreadsheets, CSV, JSON, XML, etc:
I think it's just that OPML has traditionally been used to import/export lists of RSS feeds, and therefore most readers are capable of importing an OPML file whereas other formats would not be as widely supported.
Maybe I'm thick, but it bewilders me that someone wouldn't simply use RSS or Atom directly, instead of abusing OPML to mis-represent it (which is itself just as terribly designed as RSS, by the same person, Dave Winer -- don't even get me started).
Is this some kind of a masochistic corrupted data ingestion challenge from TikTok that I'm not aware of, akin to eating Tide Pods or washing your clothes in Campbell's Soup?
Does anyone even ever use OPML for outlines any more? Or is it like YAML's backflip, where its original name meant "Yet Another Markup Language" until somebody pointed out to their great surprise that it WASN'T actually a markup language, so they retroactively recursively renamed it "YAML Ain't Markup Language" on opposite day?
So does OPML no longer stand for "Outline Processor Markup Language" any more, but now stands for something else like "OPML Presents Mere Lists"?
What's wrong with exporting and importing RSS as RSS? Has its meaning also changed, flipping places with OPML, so it now means "RSS Serves Structures", so you use RSS for nested trees and OPML for flat lists now?
I suppose you could recursively encode outlines as nested RSS feeds inside the text content other RSS feeds as <
That OPML "outline" has no tree structure at all, except for the single top level container item:
What is the point of using OPML for a flat structure?Outlines are all well and fine, but a list of links to blogs is hardly an outline.
And isn't JSON the simplest most ubiquitous accessible standard format for outlines and even arrays of links these days, if not just raw-dogging XML?
More thoughts and opinions and history of OPML, RSS, Dave Winer, More, Frontier, Manila, Radio UserLand, XML-RPC, SOAP, Xanadu, spreadsheets, CSV, JSON, XML, etc:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21170434
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224154
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20780928
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35674125
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36544675