[HN Gopher] OPML is underrated
___________________________________________________________________
OPML is underrated
Author : thunderbong
Score : 158 points
Date : 2024-02-10 09:31 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kmaasrud.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kmaasrud.com)
| JimDabell wrote:
| I seem to recall that OPML wasn't as interoperable as it should
| have been and there was no guarantee an OPML file from one app
| could be used in another app. Has this improved?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I don't recall having issues with that on the handful of
| occasions I used it.
|
| It's not a particular hard format to parse. Basically it's just
| a list of stuff. Boggles the mind that you would use a
| different format for exporting a list of a urls that point to
| lists of stuff than for those actual lists of stuff. Either
| way, parsing a list of stuff is not rocket science. But you
| could just use RSS or Atom for this.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _Boggles the mind that you would use a different format_
|
| My understanding is that Winer's main interest has always
| been outliners, and RSS etc. were just fortunate side
| excursions, so I find it about as boggling as the phenomenon
| that people with hammers are likely to be pushing Open Nail
| Markup Languages.
| slow_typist wrote:
| But semantics... RSS is flat and items are usually ordered
| by pubdate. OPML is better suited for relatively static
| collections of things organised in a tree. Using OPML to
| store blogrolls makes sense (but is not the only viable
| option of course).
| chrismorgan wrote:
| When it talks about XSL stylesheets, which _in theory_ you can
| use to have _all_ your documents be XML and transformed into
| HTML, it's worth noting that this is a part of browsers that's
| been neglected for over a decade, with the minimum of maintenance
| to keep it still roughly working, and it shows. The failure modes
| are bad, and a lot of it is very difficult to debug. It's like
| opening a portal to how you'd develop pages fifteen or more years
| ago.
|
| The worst problem I know of is that loading an XML file with an
| XSL stylesheet into a new tab in Firefox just hangs. Has done for
| years, and I still haven't searched for a bug report about it (
| _surely_ someone's already reported it). Try opening
| https://kmaasrud.com/blogroll.xml in a new tab (Ctrl+click or
| whatever), and observe the correct document title, but how the
| actual document area remains blank and the status bar says it's
| still "Transferring data from kmaasrud.com...". A quick Ctrl+R
| and it loads just fine the second time.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| That URL loaded for me fine in FF 122.0.1 ....
| saagarjha wrote:
| Works for me in Safari too.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Did you open it in a new tab? In an existing tab, it loads
| fine.
|
| On reflection, it's also quite possible this is a platform-
| specific bug. I'm on Linux. I _think_ I experienced it in
| Windows a few years back, but the memory is fuzzy.
|
| ... hmm, apparently if I start a blank Firefox profile this
| doesn't happen either. Though I _know_ I've encountered this
| with at least two completely distinct Firefox profiles over
| the years. This bears closer investigation.
|
| Anyway, it's still indicative of the disrepair of this
| feature set. It's still used widely enough that I don't
| _think_ it'll be torn out, but honestly on technical
| robustness grounds it could warrant being removed.
| readams wrote:
| Maybe try disabling your extensions?
| perlgeek wrote:
| It works fine for me, with a current FF on Linux (Ubuntu),
| opening in a new tab. I have lots of extensions enabled.
|
| But I do share your frustration: the modern web seems
| unusable, unless you have a collection of extensions that
| block ads, annoying consent forms and the likes. But once
| you have these extensions installed, you basically lose all
| support.
|
| Sometimes stuff breaks, and it works in a new profile even
| with the same extensions installed... and then what? You're
| supposed to throw away your profile with bookmarks, CAs,
| years of history etc.?
| anjel wrote:
| >But once you have these extensions installed, you
| basically lose all support.
|
| Its gotten to the point where I have multiple browsers as
| fallback. FF with lots of essential extensions > Brave
| with just a few > Unextended Chromium. A necessarily
| ridiculous state of affairs, but there you have it.
| maxcoder4 wrote:
| Same for me, but without Brave as a middle ground. I
| think Firefox even without extensions is less and less
| supported, sadly.
| billywhizz wrote:
| works fine for me in a new tab also on chrome/ubuntu.
| jnellis wrote:
| It works for me if you open in a new tab, a new window, or
| a new private window. FF122.0 on windows.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| Firefox is sometimes weird that way. I too have seen issues
| (with other stuff, not this particular xslt page) that
| randomly seem in only some profile.
| sbruchmann wrote:
| > Try opening https://kmaasrud.com/blogroll.xml in a new tab
| (Ctrl+click or whatever), and observe the correct document
| title, but how the actual document area remains blank and the
| status bar says it's still "Transferring data from
| kmaasrud.com...".
|
| It worked for me: https://imgur.com/a/Qccw9kT
| Ambroisie wrote:
| Opening it in a new tab on FF on Android works fine on the
| first try.
| cristoperb wrote:
| > Try opening https://kmaasrud.com/blogroll.xml in a new tab
| (Ctrl+click or whatever)
|
| I can't reproduce your issue (on Firefox 115.7.0esr (64-bit)
| from Debian). I open it in a new tab with middle click and it
| loads fine immediately.
| billywhizz wrote:
| XSLT is also so much more than just a way to render html.
| especially version 2. the browsers afaik are still XSLT 1 which
| is kinda limited.
|
| back in the day i built so many nice solutions for both web and
| internal services using XSLT as a key component. i also found
| it interesting that it was pretty easy for less experienced
| devs and particularly non-devs to pick up and make changes to.
| declarative programming has been much neglected sadly.
| jkoudys wrote:
| XSLT was one of the things that brought me to React
| indirectly over a decade ago. I wanted to runs something like
| apply-templates (components) and that got me looking at XHP.
| That was the inspiration for JSX which became popular via
| react. Ironically I don't even use jsx anymore now that
| javascript has caught up, and a lot of what react does was
| really appealing from the declarative side. Weirdly so many
| of the "experts" are pushing very non-declarative approaches
| to it now. I'd love if xslt could achieve its stated goals,
| but like the rest of xml it's too academic and ignores
| obvious practical requirements.
| zcw100 wrote:
| What I like best about XSLT is that it reminds me that
| someone thought this was a great idea. They went so far as
| to declare it as "the way" and everyone should use it
| everywhere. There were conferences, books, blogs,
| everything. Anyone who criticized it was harshly rebuked
| and criticized. It isn't just XSLT. The highway of IT
| progress is littered with these. XML, XSLT, CORBA, JEE...
| It's helpful to keep in mind that nothing has changed, the
| current ones just haven't blown up yet.
| billywhizz wrote:
| well yes. i agree re corba, j2ee etc. but i think there
| were a lot of very nice technologies around xml that
| enabled automatic discovery, interop, validation etc. and
| we have ditched them all because there was also a lot of
| unnecessarily complex baggage and tooling that came with
| the ecosystem around them.
|
| i even thought SOAP was quite nice if you used the
| message oriented flavour instead of RPC flavour. REST
| _was_ imo better and won out, but then nobody really does
| REST today and we seem to keep on re-inventing the wheel.
| am watching the htmx discourse with interest.
| thechao wrote:
| My day job combines assembly and XSL (GPU dev work can be
| weird). I have a soft spot for XSL; but, at this point,
| the combination of Python 3's performance story
| (concurrency, threading, multiprocessing), ElementTree,
| and itertools... I just don't see it anymore. Especially
| since any new hire has Python experience due to the
| current ML summer. I've been porting all my XSL to
| Python, and I couldn't be happier.
| billywhizz wrote:
| yeah, making XML/XSLT fast is definitely a hard problem.
| still in pretty wide use in enterprise systems where
| correctness and interop are bigger priorities. i did
| quite a lot of work with shipping api's recently and you
| would be surprised how many of them are still XML and
| even SOAP based.
|
| i'm intrigued by the combination of Assembly and XSL -
| any pointers to what you use those for?
| thechao wrote:
| Hardware specs are written in docbook in a lot of places.
| On the flip side, new HW won't have good C compilers for
| a while.
| riedel wrote:
| I still find it hard to write transformations nicely in
| normal programming languages. I actually even used it to
| transform structured formats and always am quite happy
| (using [0]). Also generated spreadsheets and docs
| (actually via markdown and pandoc) just 2 days ago.
| xsltproc is for me the awk/sed of structured.
|
| [0] http://www.ananas.org/xi/
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Now that computers have more than 640kb of memory, it's
| much easier to parse a document tree into a data
| structure and output exactly what you want.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Ever since I played around with xhtml/xslt ~15-20 years
| ago when I was a lot newer to programming, I've always
| had the sense that it was a great way to do things, and
| that most sites should be using it. The last few days
| I've been playing with it again, and... I feel even more
| like that's true.
|
| Even in its neglected state, it's got tons of features.
| You know how when Hacker News is having server issues, it
| tends to still work when logged out? Well you can just
| always serve the logged out page so it's cached for
| everyone, and then in the xslt template you can do an
| include of the user's data (that's right, you can
| directly include and query other xml documents in
| xhtml/xslt), e.g. <xsl:variable name="myinfo"
| select="document('/app/users/myinfo')"/> or something,
| and set that URL to private cache or no-cache, and then
| in the parts where you need the page to be different for
| the logged in user, you can e.g. compare
| '$myinfo/user/@id' to '@authorId' of a comment to decide
| whether to show an edit/delete button, etc. You basically
| get graceful degradation by default if it can't fetch
| that myinfo document. XPath is like jq that's been built
| into the browser this whole time.
|
| The same thing can be used for things like subreddit side
| bars that are common across many but not all pages. You
| can even do an xsl:copy-of and serve it as xhtml. No need
| to send the same data over and over with SSR. No need to
| do client side routing or have any frontend tooling. It's
| all built right into the browser. The code is concise
| (it's verbose in the sense that it's xml, but it's still
| declarative) and easy to read. You can have a clean
| separation between backend sending the data in an xml
| model that makes sense for the domain, and then frontend
| having templates to present it.
|
| The downside is of course that it all runs before the
| html for your page is produced, so you can't use
| javascript inside of xsl (unless you run a separate xsl
| processor in javascript), and it's about the same as SSR
| in terms of how dynamic it is (i.e. not interactive after
| page load, though you can of course have javascript in
| the output html). That and there's no info out there
| about how to use it because no one uses it, so you have
| to be a little creative. But it's been quite fun to see
| how much I can milk out of client side static template
| rendering using a technology that browsers haven't even
| bothered to update past 1.0 from 1999.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Ad-hoc and framework JavScript rendering JSON into the
| DOM is the modern way, don't you know? There's a reason
| for this: JSON is easier to produce than XML in many
| server-side systems.
|
| Maybe what's needed is an extension to XSLT/XPath to
| consume JSON and transform it to XML.
| ponderings wrote:
| On the other hand, it wouldn't take much doing at~all to
| modify something that outputs json into something that
| outputs xml.
| billywhizz wrote:
| yes. back in the day i would tend to wrap my database api
| in xml first in a standardised way and then i could just
| use xslt to return json or other formats from the api
| depending on the mime types requested by client. this
| fits in nicely with fielding's REST principles. all those
| technologies (HTTP/REST, XML, XPath, XML Schema, XSLT)
| actually work very nicely together and allow you to build
| nice systems that are very flexible, easy to integrate
| with and easy to change, even though they can be hard to
| make fast. maybe "move fast, break things" was a bad
| idea? =)
| cryptonector wrote:
| Why make your payloads bigger though?
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| another XSLT advocate here.
|
| The first time I encountered XSLT I thought it was the
| most ridiculous thing to ever have been invented. A
| programming language written in XML?
|
| but damn, the things you can do with that thing in a tiny
| bit of code. It was doing expression filtering years
| before anyone else, including the likes of Haskell.
| billywhizz wrote:
| yes, the learning curve can be a problem initially but,
| once you grok it, it opens up a whole world of
| interesting possibilities. and i do think, once you have
| created your initial transforms, it is then much easier
| for non-tech folks to "see" how things work and make
| tweaks/changes without having to mess with "code".
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wasn't mature enough to grasp xslt at the time (the
| match construct confused me, and trees everywhere wasn't
| natural yet), but while you talk about corba and jee I
| had a few moments in the recent years where I thought all
| the json/rest/microservices are hand knitted remote
| beans..
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I had never heard of XSLT before until I happened upon this
| Esperanto dictionary. https://www.tujavortaro.net/
| donatj wrote:
| Blizzard of all peoples site in the late aughts was all XML
| with XSLT. It was kind of beautiful.
| whartung wrote:
| I opened that URL.
|
| It opened fine in Safari (macOS), and it opened fine in Chrome.
| Firefox did not apply the XSL file.
|
| I tried to "view source" on both Safari and Chrome, and neither
| gave me the option. I could Inspect Element, and I got the HTML
| DOM, but not the original XML source. On Firefox, it showed me
| the XML file.
|
| This surprised me. I was under the understanding that the
| browsers had effectively abandoned the XML/XSL concept any
| more. Apparently Firefox does.
|
| It's also a shame the browsers stopped at XSL v1 as well, v2 is
| much better.
|
| But, the browsers basically said "we're not in the XML
| ecosystem, we're in the HTML ecosystem".
|
| The idea of downloading XSL, and then having a blog post that
| was little more than just content, with a wee bit of meta data,
| with all the chrome rendered locally via the template, I find
| that idea compelling. One less thing to download. More stuff to
| cache on the local system.
|
| I had grand visions of an XProc pipeline terminated in the
| browser itself, but when I found out the browsers weren't
| really playing along anymore, kind of took the wind out of its
| sails.
| abrahms wrote:
| The "here's the content, you do the rendering" is very close
| to what gemini does. https://geminiprotocol.net/
| cryptonector wrote:
| > Firefox did not apply the XSL file.
|
| It did for me. The "This is a list of blogs and news sources
| I follow." part of the page as rendered comes from the XSL
| file (opml.xsl). The actual list is rendered. I'm did not
| check whether the XSL was applied _correctly_ , but applied
| it was.
|
| > On Firefox, ["view source"] showed be the XML file.
|
| Can confirm.
|
| > The idea of downloading XSL, [...], I find that idea
| compelling.
|
| > [...] but when I found out the browsers weren't really
| playing along anymore, kind of took the wind out of its
| sails.
|
| Sad, yes, but for me Firefox _did_ download the XML, the XSL,
| applied the XSL, and rendered the resulting page. I dunno why
| it didn 't for you or GP, but maybe it's an add-on
| interfering? Do check, and please report, because I'm curious
| if the issue is add-ons.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| Works for me too. I see a list with bolded links and
| descriptions and when I view source I see xml starting with
| an opml tag, instead of html.
|
| edit: and yes opened the link on a new tab
| cryptonector wrote:
| It loads for me, and it applies the XSL. Do you have NoScript
| or some add-on like it interfering with the loading?
| llimos wrote:
| This discussion awoke an ancient memory in me - this DailyWTF
| article about skechers.com
| https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Sketchy-Skecherscom
|
| The article is (as to be expected) very disparaging, but the
| author responded with valid points. Either way, a fun read and
| a blast from the past.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| If combatting the enshittification of the internet keeps making
| things turn back 23 years like this, I'm all for it.
|
| I'd like:
|
| - my 2001 hairline
|
| - my 2001 waistline
|
| - plenty of notice not to fuck up an opportunity like I did in
| 2007
|
| Thanks, magic time loop of rediscovery!
| bjoli wrote:
| 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
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've never _liked_ XML, _per se_ , but I used it extensively,
| for decades, and even got fairly good with it.
|
| These days, I mostly use JSON, but XML is pretty much an
| ironclad data definition and transfer protocol. You can define
| and transfer just about any type of data, using it, albeit, in
| a rather "prolix" manner.
| ambigious7777 wrote:
| XML is such a versatile format, and I wished it was used so
| much more. It doesn't have exactly the cleanest syntax, but
| it would be so much better than JSON in some of the cases
| I've seen. Especially when you are transfering document-type
| data. Why use JSON to represent rich text, when XML is
| infinitely better?
| cryptonector wrote:
| > but XML is pretty much an ironclad data definition and
| transfer protocol.
|
| I suspect that may be why you might not have liked it. XML is
| _not_ a good serialization of data for network protocols. XML
| _is_ a good serialization of _documents_. Ok, that 's the
| received wisdom that I'm echoing, but it's also my experience
| and my opinion.
|
| When it comes to serialization of data for network protocols
| there are and have been many other better-suited schemes. XML
| got used as a serialization protocol for the the web because
| it's what existed at the time that was... close to HTML and
| textual, but it's got the disadvantage of being verbose.
| josteink wrote:
| > Whenever I have to write it Emacs verifies the doctype for me
| and handles the structural part of it.
|
| Clearly you are not talking about the OOB experience here?
|
| What customizations have you made? Something you can share?
|
| Here's me hoping I can move my MSBuild work to Emacs ;)
| gkbrk wrote:
| It's pretty much out-of-the-box. I remember Emacs validating
| XML automatically as well, and knowing the schemas somehow.
| josteink wrote:
| Regular Emacs or Doom-Emacs?
|
| I dont recall getting schema-validation... ever.
| bjoli wrote:
| I remember spending some time writing some kind of wrapper
| for converters from dtd and w3c XML schema to relax Ng
| compact. Then nxml handles the rest.
|
| If I recall correctly it probably just litters my nxml schema
| dir with whatever I happen to edit.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Its not just you. I think web development would be in a much
| nicer place today if we spent the last 20 years improving XML
| and XSLT rather than abandoning it for JSON and client-side JS.
|
| People are starting to realize that most sites really boil down
| to parsing server state and rendering DOM. We never needed to
| do all this nonsense with serializing all state to JSON and
| shipping the entire rendering pipeline to the browser, that was
| just a heavy handed solution for a very specific scaling issue
| at Facebook.
| d-lisp wrote:
| I want to believe in the cycle: "From telnet to static web to
| dynamic web to clientside rendered to serverside rendered to
| telnet."
| Andrex wrote:
| Just as a thought exercise, if XML had been the de facto
| interchange format, how much would that have added to the
| historical bandwidth transfer of the Internet? Even 1 KB
| added to every AJAX call would add up pretty significantly
| pretty fast, I'd imagine...
|
| Obviously JSON isn't well optimized either but I wonder how
| much, if any, progress might have been slowed by XML syntax
| clogging the pipes even more.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Resource requirements expand until it they hit a user-
| noticable limit. Even ultra-compressed every-bit-counts
| encodings[0] would be ignored and abused until they're
| bloated to a user-noticable limit. Or the extra bandwidth
| would be used for more video ads.
|
| > how much, if any, progress might have been slowed by XML
| syntax clogging the pipes even more.
|
| Depends what you mean by "progress", and if you think Web
| development has been improving or devolving over time.
|
| [0]https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/research/publication/functio...
| zaik wrote:
| I feel like most web applications today make hundreds of
| HTTP requests when opening them. If that's acceptable, then
| XML vs. JSON doesn't matter.
| _heimdall wrote:
| XML is definitely more verbose than JSON, though I'd be
| very surprised if an average content-heavy site would be
| smaller with something like JSON + react. I'd be surprised
| if server components tipped the scales either given that
| the server state would still be shipped as HTML and/or a
| virtual dom representation.
| cryptonector wrote:
| _FastInfoSet enters the chat_
|
| I.e., you can have XML and have it be compact by
| serializing it to something very close to ASN.1's PER
| (packed encoding rules).
|
| Ditto for JSON, though there's lots of competing binary
| JSON schemes out there.
| cryptonector wrote:
| jq is to JSON as XSLT/XPath is to XML.
|
| Maybe any time we create a new serialization scheme we should
| create an ETL for it.
|
| Or maybe we shouldn't create new serialization schemes all
| the time. Here's just a few of them, and that's rather many:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_data-
| serializati...
|
| Maybe we should require licensure for creating new
| serialization schemes :)
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I like XML. There, I said it.
|
| JSON can be a valid choice, as can XML, but I feel that the
| decision about which to use is too often based on fashion
| rather than choosing the best tool for the job. I wish this was
| different but there seems to be something structural in web
| development that favours the new over the proven, regardless of
| the circumstances.
| virtue3 wrote:
| XML was/is great. It was the issue with people abusing the shit
| out of CDATA and comments to do meta programming inside the XML
| and making it an absolute nightmare.
|
| I believe it was an additional reason why comments were
| excluded from the JSON spec. I can't find the exact quote but
| Crockford's comment about excluding them for parser directive
| reasoning is pretty bang on considering usage of JSON primarily
| as an interchange format (and evidence of a good decision based
| on it's staying power).
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190112173904/https://plus.goog...
| captn3m0 wrote:
| What I would really like to see is "subscribeable OPML feeds", so
| GitHub could provide a OPML feed for what shows up in your home
| page, and you any changes in your subscriptions (repos you watch
| etc) would change the OPML, which would then cause your feed
| reader to unsubscribe/subscribe to specific RAS feeds.
|
| Unfortunately, this isn't supported by the majority of RSS
| clients (tt-rss is the only one I know) which means in practice
| OPML feeds are merely import/export mechanisms.
|
| Ref: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas#opml-sync
| rakoo wrote:
| FreshRSS also allows that, and I agree with you: this is really
| nice.
| mikepk wrote:
| So many memories. That was a big part of my first startup in
| 2005. Grazr was the "next level of rss". Unfortunately the
| first level never quite took off.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/18/grazr-10-blasts-off-into-t...
| tupolef wrote:
| I made a generator in bash to follow releases/tags of starred
| Github repositories, by user or by starred lists.
|
| It can generate updates.
|
| I import them in Miniflux.
|
| https://git.tkapias.net/tkapias/gh-starred-to-opml/
|
| https://gist.github.com/tkapias/c54f7b2631160329491e80652a2b...
| captn3m0 wrote:
| I made the same thing in a Ruby/Sinatra web-app 6 years ago:
| https://github.com/captn3m0/opml-gen
|
| I got tired of importing regularly to Minuflux though, I just
| use the GitHub UI these days.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| > creating a recommendation system that is based on concious
| curation, not statistical metric
|
| That's good, but that's still a recommendation of
| authors/channels, not articles. It's still who vs what. For me
| the concept of "subreddits" is the best we've achieved in in
| terms of social sharing. It was about what over who. You picked a
| subject, followed a subreddit, and found articles, videos etc...
| about that subject. Conscious curation on specific subjects.
|
| I still use the old.reddit.com, but few non-tech people do and
| the primary Reddit interface has pushed people away from the
| platform and a lot of the smaller subreddits are drying up.
|
| I understand why the changes were made and it brings the question
| of how can we create social sharing based on subjects that is
| either distributed (but easy to use by non-tech people) or
| centralised and profitable?
| chriswarbo wrote:
| For those who don't know, Reddit provide feeds at URLs like
| `/r/foo/.rss` (although they're actually Atom...)
|
| Annoyingly this doesn't work when combining subreddits, e.g.
| `/r/foo+bar+baz` is HTML containing posts from those three
| subreddits, but `/r/foo+bar+baz/.rss` only includes posts from
| one :(
| talkingtab wrote:
| A side question. I personally believe that RSS is a failure, and
| I don't know why. There are easy comments and responses to this,
| but I am looking for something deeper - an analysis that would
| show how it could be changed and adopted on a wider basis.
|
| My context:
|
| When Apple introduced the iPhone and it was a success almost
| everyone introduced an "iPhone Killer". The zune being a prime
| example. They were announced with much glee and anticipation.
| They were not products of flimsy development and thought
| processes, but serious failures for companies like Microsoft. No
| one, that I remember, was able to point compelling reasons why
| the new products would fail, but they inevitably did. Over and
| over.
|
| How and why did these phones fail? If you have read the book
| "Flatland", you perhaps came away with a vision of how creatures
| living in two dimensions would perceive actions that used a third
| dimension. As I did. Things would magically appear and disappear
| in a way would leave the Flatlanders completely perplexed. This
| imaginary "missing dimension" experience reminds of how
| bewildered people were that the Zune and other iPhone killers
| failed.
|
| What could that dimension be? My guess is the human dimension. I
| don't mean in trivial ways like user friendly, I rather as way
| for people to find it useful and helpful.
|
| My question then, if anyone wants to try, is what would one have
| to do to RSS to fix it?
|
| [Note 1] Oddly, the OPML "blog roll" example resonates with me
| much more than RSS ever has.
|
| [Note 2] I have repeatedly tried to use RSS and failed. Both as a
| provider and subscriber.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Fashion. Early iPhones were a sign of wealth. They still are to
| some extent.
| pmarreck wrote:
| When Teslas came out in the model S format, they were the
| "iPhone of cars", not just because of wealth (which is a
| piss-poor argument for why something succeeded btw), but
| because of a fundamental improvement in the essence of the
| category
|
| If "status signaling" was really as significant an influence
| as you say, then every single original Macintosh would've
| been a huge hit and clearly was not. Every single Powerbook
| and Macbook as well, since those are more visible and
| portable. If you want to talk "fashion accessory," then there
| are plenty of phones that were expensive as well at the time
| that did not take off either.
|
| The reason why Apple was finally successful, is because Steve
| Jobs took a calligraphy class for fun instead of an
| engineering class, and all those things like the Zune were
| designed by engineers, first and foremost. Holistic thinking
| is not rational.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| iPhones were expensive, so iPhones were mostly used by
| wealthy people. That made it attractive for companies to make
| iPhone apps: not because of market share, but because it was
| targeted to those willing to pay. Software developers were
| happy for the busy-work, and once a company had its own
| iPhone app they might as well mention it in their marketing.
| The public saw all this focus on iPhones and concluded that
| they must be more popular than they actually were (i.e. the
| only thing more desirable than a status symbol, is a status
| symbol you think everyone except you already has!). That
| boosted sales, making it more popular but reducing its
| correlation to wealth. At that point it was firmly
| established culturally, technologically, economically, etc.
| which makes it attractive via the usual market share
| arguments.
| praisewhitey wrote:
| Zune was an MP3 player that competed with the iPod. It wasn't a
| phone.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Tangential: if you want to play around with XSLT, I've made a
| little tool for that a while ago: https://xsltbin.ale.sh/
|
| (Known bugs: indent="yes" doesn't work on Firefox, and
| unfortunately I couldn't be bothered with adding a separate
| formatter, so probably try it in WebKit/Blink browsers)
| CrypticShift wrote:
| I have an observation on the original use of OPML, i.e., for
| outliners (the one I utilize frequently) : Many recent outliners
| (logseq, roam) added custom properties/fields (for DB-like block-
| level queries), but they don't seem to support them when
| importing or exporting opml. The only "field" that is somewhat
| supported is the "_note" [1].
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20131205072742/https://jeffreyki...
| Tomte wrote:
| Yes, same with Workflowy. All advanced features are non-
| exportable. And "advanced" includes images.
|
| It's a pity.
| knight17 wrote:
| Off topic question. Which outliner are you using currently? I
| am finding it difficult to get good outliners for writing in
| Windows.
| CrypticShift wrote:
| I'm using dynalist.io. I'm just used to it. The app is
| Electron, though. but I feel it is responsive enough for
| writing.
| donatj wrote:
| On a related note, it's one of my biggest irritations how it's
| becoming more and more difficult by the day to find the RSS feed
| underlying any given podcast.
|
| To me, a podcast always just was just an RSS feed of type audio.
| If you don't provide that feed, you're not a podcast. You're
| something else.
|
| These walled gardens are rolling in and claiming territory over
| what was a beautiful bastion of freedom. I hate it so much.
| rambambram wrote:
| I don't use podcasts, but I always found it strange that people
| speak of podcasting as this open thing (because of RSS) while
| the audio files are usually hosted inside walled gardens (?).
| The RSS file is nothing but a link to the audio file, right? Or
| am I missing something?
| donatj wrote:
| There's metadata as well, title, episode description.
| Everything is just a standard RSS item except for the podcast
| specific stuff. You can read it with a standard RSS reader.
|
| Regardless of who is hosting the audio, if you can get the
| free, the audio files are publicly available without an
| account.
| lawik wrote:
| The audio file is hosted on any HTTP server. That is very
| open web. Except on Spotify which is closed and arguably not
| actually a podcasting service.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| There's nothing walled garden about the file storage IME. You
| could use an IPFS link if you wanted too...though without a
| proxy I doubt most clients would be able to download it.
| gsich wrote:
| Podcast have a RFC MUST for RSS feeds.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| What podcast client do you use? Every podcast in the iTunes
| directory has a public RSS feed. If you're having trouble
| figuring out the feed from that directory, you can use a tool
| to show you the link from the podcast's directory page. For
| example, paste Smartless' page
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/smartless/id1521578868
|
| into https://www.labnol.org/podcast/
|
| to get https://rss.art19.com/smartless
|
| At this point, just about the only podcasts that don't have
| public RSS cost money, now that Spotify has abandoned its
| exclusives strategy. If you were subscribed to a public feed
| that moved to Spotify exclusive, it's probably started
| repopulating in the last year.
|
| If you are referring to YouTube shows, all Youtube channels
| have RSS feeds in the format
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCX6OQ3D...
| (UCX... is a channel ID.)
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "On a related note, it's one of my biggest irritations how it's
| becoming more and more difficult by the day to find the RSS
| feed underlying any given podcast."
|
| It is unclear if this statement is intended to mean it's
| becoming more difficult specifically for the author, or more
| difficult in general, for everyone.
|
| Please offer some examples of (free) podcasts to support the
| statement showing how it is "more difficult" to find the
| .rss/.xml feed.
|
| In return I will demonstrate how to "easily" find the feed for
| the examples given.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| It's a pretty unreasonable request. Unless parent, after
| noticing the trend, began to keep track of each instance in
| order to write a blogpost or something, they're not going to
| recall any unless there's a particular stark and irksome
| example that they still can't access.
|
| Personally I agree. This is getting harder and harder to do.
| Often there's a way to finally find the rss if you dig
| enough, but I remember cracking out a web inspector in the
| last year to do it.
|
| This is effectively blocking 99% of people from pulling these
| things out of walled services, which is the important
| question, not whether it is technically feasible to retrieve.
|
| Even ignoring that anecdote, if someone has to find a
| "convert iTunes link to RSS" website, it relies on them even
| knowing what RSS is, knowing that iTunes podcasts have an
| underlying RSS feed powering them, etc.
|
| RSS used to be something that only the marginally more
| literate than usual understoof how to use, and was
| ubiquitous. But if this trend continues, it'll be more akin
| to plan files.
| rambambram wrote:
| So true.
|
| > I believe the simple fact that there is a known person behind
| each recommendation is advantageous.
|
| I think this is key to OPML gaining traction again.
|
| I for myself added an OPML list to my website (see bio) which
| contains hundreds of independent blogs. You can all download that
| for free. Most of the blogs I found are from here, but I've been
| doing that for two years straight, so there might be blogs you
| don't know. They've been roughly selected for quality.
|
| edit: OPML file can be found at the bottom, behind the link 'Or
| see all shared links', then click the OPML icon
| artsi0m wrote:
| I would like to share opml, but at the same time I would like to
| have some of my subscription staying private. Would be cool to
| have some elisp or shell + xmlstarlet script to export only
| things that I would feel normal to share.
| epaulson wrote:
| 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
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