 Bela Labovitch's occasional musings on technical matters |
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OPML Podcast and some (delayed) comments Despite the freezing cold here in Boston yesterday, I finally found the hour to head out with my iPod and listen to the faboulous OPML Podcast put together by Alex Barnett, Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea. It is wonderful to listen to a discussion about a topic that swirls around in my mind quite a bit. I had some thoughts about parts of the podcast: Namespaces: there was much discussion about OPML Namespaces in the podcast. I think that we are missing the beauty of the OPML format here. As we start using namespaces, we are bound to find things getting "messier" to quote Adam. As tags are the 'disruptive' quick and dirty, not without issues, but simple solutions to complex taxonomies, why can attributes not be the lay mans version of elements? Adam makes a comment during the podcast about it ultimately being the machine that needs to understand the namespace and elements. The same machine can probably see 'email' as an attribute and treat it specially (as it treats the 'type' or 'url' attributes today) - or perhaps not treat it specially, but utilize that name/value pair for purposes such as search. I bounced this idea off John Tropea after reading his OPML for OPAC post. He asked about how OPML searching tools might deal with this. OPML Search already puts the attribute name/value pairs into a relational database. Its probably worth the experiment of extending the search beyond just the 'text' attribute, to allow for searching for any name/value pairs in an outline. I may be way off, but it feels as if there is something simple and disruptive here. Distributed data: the distributed data part of the podcast was interesting and thought provoking. Just as OPML is playing a role in moving data in and out of aggregators today, it feels like it can play an expanded role as a "data container" to move all kinds of data in and out of services in the future. Nice podcast guys - thank you! |
Bela Labovitch Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 10:15 PM.
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