OPML Inclusions
Today on OPML news: “The next item on my list is to write a plan for a new OPML type that unambiguously identifies a link as being an inclusion.”. Like I said, all we need is a common way of using OPML attributes.
The inclusion thing is very important, it will open the door to dynamic OPML rendering and sectioning with many nice application possible: for example, a weblog backend that speaks OPML could have inclusions referring to the backend itself, with parameters to select the branch to include, to mine the whole database without downloading everything.
A client for this OPML server could be an OPML renderer that creates the actual HTML representation of the weblog. Or a browser based OPML browser sectioning the blog archive from different points of view, depending on the other attributes found. Or a little desktop application that can download the entire archive as a single OPML file. Or the classic On this day in application.
Having all my content as a big OPML file I can query, transform and render, either on my powerbook or on a server or both is something I miss today.
Outside the personal content realm, many directory-based application will benefit from this without requiring the annoying detection of the linked file type.
