As I’ve said before, I’m not in the business of setting standards - I’m in the business of building tools. My personal preference is towards opml-plus-xml because of the precedent of previous XML formats. Any tools I build will support both, and until there is a clear determination of which will stick, it is highly advisable for other toolmakers to do similarly.

In my previous comment, I meant “FeedDemon”, not “FeedBurner”.

In terms of which I’m using - I’m using “text/xml opml” on my sites. I have little time for specifications, but I have a lot of time for working code. I asked a question about this privately a while back to some OPML folk (including Dave Winer) but had no response. I left it up to someone else to work out the details. As for what goes on my site, I will use what is most popular - and I will be extending my code soon to track what type attribute people are using.

The library that I am writing at the moment based on what I’m using at changes.opiumfield.com (which you guys should ping!) should accept all different varieties. I’m not sure whether it should be my responsibility to tell you what The Standard is. In fact, I think the person who could probably help us come to a consensus is Dave Winer - he has a lot of experience in ratifying these sorts of argument - a minefield I’d rather avoid.

According to the OPML 1.0 specification, there is no requirement on MIME type. There is a convention, based on what Radio UserLand did, to use “text/x-opml”. The convention for using “text/opml xml” is based on the way that other XML formats have done - “xsl xml”, “xhtml xml” etc.

As for Randy’s suggestion of using a ‘text’ attribute - surely a ‘title’ right?

like James, I too am not a programmer, I simply copied the code from James’ site and changed the uri.

Seeing sterling’s comment above I decided to see what he as the developer of the WordPress plugin believes to be the correct syntax - Sterling’s looks like:

So the Sterling, at least, agrees with you on the x-opml.

Don’t know Tom Morris - hopefully James will come back on that one.

Bloglines can be configured to automatically provide an OPML subscription list of the feeds you read (aside from the ones you’ve marked non-public):

http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=rcade

The “Reading List” icon in my blog’s sidebar links to my Bloglines OPML, which stays current automatically.

Should it be Randy? Tom Morris says it should be text/xml opml and since I’m not much of a programmer myself I’ll leave you two debate it. Agreed though that there should be a Text attribute. It was sheer laziness on my part for leaving it out.

I’ve mentioned to Nick Bradbury that it would be nice if you could auto-sync a folder to an OPML file, or just have FeedDemon manage that folder in an external OPML file. That hasn’t happened yet.

For instance I created a Guide for Entrepreneurship in Ireland (ie. a list of blogs I subscribe to which I consider relevant to Irish entrepreneurs) and then in the Properties for that Guide I chose to Publish it as a Reading List. BlogBridge gives it a URL and hosts it for you. Mine is at -

http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/4527/EirePreneurship.opml

Whenever I change the list of feeds in that Guide all I have to do is re-sync or have it re-sync automatically and the OPML changes accordingly.

As regards OPML autodiscovery, yes, it’s difficult to see reasons for doing that right now but, as with RSS autodiscovery, we’ll see more and more reasons as time goes on. It’s all part of the bootstrap for the ecosystem. Now that the likes of Tom Morris OPML Ping Server can track the growing universe of OPML we could expect to see OPML spiders launching soon.

Also Tom its good to see you availing of the hierarchical capabilities of OPML to arrange your FeedRoll (or whatever term will catch on) into sub-categories. It’s now even easier to navigate

If there were some way I could have my RSS reader synch with the remote OPML file, that would reduce a lot of the overhead.

Tom - I couldn’t agree more. To me, this seems a very obvious and useful requirement. I am staggered that none of the RSS readers support it.