Discovering a List of Feeds

So I woke up this morning to discover that Sam Ruby and Dave Winer are talking about the same thing, in a different manner. Guys, I already wrote about this!

Sam is inventing a new format (FDML; wiki here); Dave proposes using OPML.

In terms of what I think about all this, I think Dave is right that OPML is already understood by all the aggregators, but I don’t agree with his discovery mechanism. I also don’t agree with Sam’s proposal of a brand new markup language to do all this, since OPML can be extended and already supports nesting.

For discovery, I don’t see why we can’t use a system similar to that for discovering RSS feeds, or Atom APIs or what have you. This is what I originally suggested back in August, and is supported by Tapestry right now:

<link rel=”index” type=”text/x-opml” title=”Index” href=”http://dwlt.net/tapestry/tapestry.opml” />

I’m not presuming that I know better than these two guys; I just happen to think that creating more work for the tools and content producers than is strictly necessary isn’t the best approach.

Anyway, whatever happens, you can rest assured that Tapestry will support the result.