It's about outliners. You move just one thing.

> but it was a bad design decision to store long blocks of HTML inside XML attributes instead of XML elements.

not at all - it's that what allows the simplest structure for nesting of outline elements.

An <outline> is an XML element, possibly containing one or more attributes, and containing any number of <outline> sub-elements.

    <node> 

      <![CDATA[ Hello I am text ]]>

      <node> ... </node>

      <node> ... </node>

    </node>

It's not so much that OPML is the interesting part here, it's that it's a file. A few weeks back Andrej Karpathy had a twitter thread[1] about blogging software and shared this link on 'File vs App' - https://stephango.com/file-over-app - and that really was great for ecosystem interoperability. I can download the file using whatever tool is appropriate, store it however I want, and then upload it somewhere else using whatever tools is appropriate. I have the OPML export I took of my subscriptions from the day Google Reader shut down and there's still a fighting chance that other services could actually import that file.

It's also worth noting that OPML is only the container format here. Agreeing on a container format is obviously important and we won't get very far for interop if we can't even agree on the container format, but OPML is supposed to be a generic tree of 'outline' format, and conveniently RSS subscriptions (and folders) look like a tree.

I sorta expected that there would be a second standard that says "here's how you use this generic OPML container format to represent RSS feed subscriptions" but oddly that's actually included right in the OPML spec[2]. In fact RSS subscriptions are the only application format defined in OPML - there's a 'type' field defined for <outline> element and if type is set to 'rss' then there's also a required xmlUrl of the feed and optional things like the html link for the blog, the version of RSS used. This is the data and part of the spec that makes the actual subscription list exchange work.

But again the only entry for 'type' defined in the OPML spec is 'rss'. If you want to use OPML as a container for something else, like Youtube subscriptions or Twitter followers, you of course can but you gotta find some way to get everyone to agree on how to interpret the 'type' you set for that <outline> element. And as far as I know, no one's done anything like that for any other domain.

So it'd be awesome if more domains defined 'type' fields and set out some specs so I can export my video streaming subscriptions or Amazon wishlist or whatever but without defining more 'type' fields OPML is really not any more interesting than a CSV of URLs.

[1] https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1751379269769695601 [2] http://opml.org/spec2.opml

Sometimes I feel I am the only person in the world who likes XML. It just followed the trajectory of all formats, where it is used in places it shouldn't have been used.

It is moderately readable and writable, and the tooling is great. Whenever I have to write it Emacs verifies the doctype for me and handles the structural part of it.

And, as the document shows, xslt makes it easy as hell to scan the contents of a file.

OPML is a good example in my opinion. I used it maybe once a year and it has never failed me

The craziest thing I see though is people importing the Atom namespace into RSS feeds to get some of the elements. At that point, I can't fathom what advantages there is to the producer to not just produce an Atom feed.

RSS 1.0 was basically the first attempt to produce something like Atom without reinventing too much, but Dave threw his toys out of the pram, so the only option was to reinvent it with a different name and clean up the remaining sharp corners.

It's tragically funny. Atom is both more correct and easier to produce and parse than any RSS variant.

Were I to join Automattic in the morning, the first thing I'd try is to attempt to get them to abandon their weird RSS mashup as their default feed format. There's no good reason why Wordpress still generates RSS feeds.

Yes, I'm a bit bitter, but I was in the feed wars, and it still stings.

Why is the name Atom?

So what? That has nothing to do with my comment.

There are feed formats named "RSS". There is a feed format named "Atom". And there is a concept named "RSS". The RSS formats, like the Atom format, are all implementations of the RSS concept. Generally, when you subscribe to an RSS feed somewhere, it will be in the Atom format. It's still called an "RSS feed" for the simple reason that that is the name of the concept.

> it's sometimes used as the name of the functionality but it's improper.

No it isn't. What would you gain by insisting that RSS feeds delivered via Atom have to be called something different than RSS feeds delivered in legacy formats? Did we rename TLS when we updated the cipher suites?

Why, in your opinion, is rssboard.org even bothering to write about Atom?

He is now asking. Are you saying it's too late?