A few days ago, I released the first version of catrss, a tool used to concatenate RSS file(s) to standard output. Today, I added OPML output to this tool. Here it is in version 0.2 (.tar.gz file, 16ko).

OPML is a file format first used in a commercial application. Now it’s widely used for the exchange of links between news aggregators. Because of that, I had to implement it in catrss: it’s a potential format for the output of catrss.

But I’m not happy with this format. It’s nice, it does its job, it’s already available, … ok. Other people already complained about this format (see here e.g.). Beside the fact it’s not standardized (it’s difficult to exactly know what software will correctly parse what you put in your outline tags), I dislike the fact that the official specifications include tags that describe what I consider as the look, feel and behaviour of the content (expansionState, vertScrollState and the window*) and not the content itself. Of course, I’ve read that they are optional. Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s a good design decision to handle things like this and mix look/behaviour and content (not in this case).

I’m sorry for people not in computer science but this is — again — another entry about programming and I understand the title and content are a bit strange for them.

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