woensdag 22 juni 2005

Why FireFox should implement OPML
Last week I was talking to a colleague about the way Mozilla FireFox uses RSS: it stores feeds in the Bookmarks area, with every feed looking like a subfolder. Every headline from the feed is shown as a bookmark, with the link-attribute as its URL.

I think it's a nice way to use RSS. It really adds some functionality to the browser, by connecting a user's bookmarks directly to the content of a website. It's rich, it's interactive, and it's certainly innovative. That's okay. But it's wrong.

When these Live Bookmarks were first introduced, a lot was written about this not being the right way to introduce a broader  audience to RSS. People who learn to know RSS trough FireFox will know it as some headline-linking-thing, not as technology used to syndicate a website. They will think RSS is something FireFox made up, used by websites to let them easily be bookmarked. Well, it is, ofcourse. But if FireFox wants an XML format to describe bookmarks in, it should have been OPML.

FireFox should implement OPML into the bookmarks. Why? Well, bookmarks are hierarchical structures exactly like outlines. They're expandable, collapsable, they have links attached and hey, OPML can link to RSS, so the Live Bookmarks would still be possible. With OPML as the native format for bookmarks, you could use an outliner like Radio or Dave's new OPML Editor to easily maintain your bookmarks. You could save them as a .opml file and publish your bookmarks and, doing so, share them. You could integrate serveal people's bookmarks and create a directory. You could subscribe to someone's bookmarks in the Instant Outliner. You could do lots of things.

Using OPML for bookmarks is a no-brainer. After all, when you choose Manage Bookmarks, you already get an outliner to maintain them. So why not use the appropriate file format?
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