OPML and XSL
May 25th, 2003
As promised, I've used XSL to transform my own blogroll format into OPML. This is the stylesheet, and here is the resulting OPML file. Not exactly rocket science, but a nice finger exercise to refresh my XSL knowledge a bit.
Some thoughts though: I don't understand why RSS readers like to export their directory as OPML. OPML is some weird mix of content and presentation (it even gives the possibility to define window positions), but has nothing to do with RSS feeds. The 'standard' is even not applied, since I couldn't find a spec of how the link to the HTML version and to the RSS version of a blog should be specified. Anyway, I derived my OPML 'format' from Steven's and Bertrand's XSLs, and added the 'author' attribute (since I put it in my 'title' attribute, you know, that cool little tooltip that appears when hovering a link).
Anyway, I also promised to develop a GUI in Jython, but since you need only one line to execute an XSL from the command line, this seems a bit overkill. Maybe I'll do it anyway, just for the fun of it.
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