Simon Fell > Its just code > OML

Thursday, April 17, 2003

OML
OPML has issues (the worst of which go away if the various applications that extend it go to the trouble to document the new attributes they've added), but I don't get it, I'm not seeing why OML is any better. How are naming clashes for the type attribute handled ?, how do I say what type of data is in the data element ? how are naming clashes in the metadata and item elements handled. What are the standard types ? XML has a standard extensibility mechanism, why isn't it used ? In fact I'm borderline on why a hierarchical data structure (an outline) needs a spec to describe how to store it in a hierarchical structure, isn't XML by definition an outline to start with ?