Okay! So Dave Winer Had Surgery
Because most of my income depends on Microsoft products, you would think that the way Dave Winer casually (and convincingly) ripped into the reputation Bill Gates during episode 6 of NerdTV would make me stay away from him (‘stay away’ in the wired sense of the term). You know that sheepish kind of avoidance that masquerades as prudence? You know that kind of mob rule based on being uncomfortable with uncertainty and being more comfortable with hypnotherapy? Well no: I don’t get down like that—that would be almost hypocritical—but I will say that Mr. Winer’s Outline Processor for Windows is in need of a less “innovative” user interface—but I ‘grant’ him the handicap of getting ill and having surgery:
The second thing that happened is that I got really sick and had surgery, followed by a long recovery and when that was over, I didn’t return to UserLand. I think almost everyone knows this and has cut me some slack on things like this, but some people apparently don’t know about it, or worse for them, don’t care. There was a very real human reason why this project and others got dropped.
What interests me is actually bringing Dave and Bill “together” with a little help from the InfoPath team. Some of you may remember my ‘Favorites saga’—when I stopped using Internet Explorer Favorites in favor of XML-based solutions (and the plural in ‘solutions’ is not a “bad thing”). A happy few of you may recall the InfoPath form I built to maintain the ‘favorites’ data. Well this form (and of course the data) is based on my own relatively goofy schema. Enter Dave Winer, the father of RSS, the hardest working man in the XML-over-Blog business and his schema for lists (and of course outlines), OPML.
I have nothing to lose and much to gain by switching over to OPML. Since InfoPath needs a schema and I can’t find a schema for OPML, I had to build my own—and, unlike one vocal critic at the office, I appreciate the openness in Dave’s 1.0 spec. This implies that my new InfoPath form is based on OPML 1.0.
But… I think it should be based on OPML 1.1. What I am seeing in Dave’s sample OPML file and with Julian Bond’s OPML Browser are the new “common attribute” url and the type name link for the outline element. I am using a similar attribute and type name for my InfoPath form (and InfoPath handles any XSD declarations in a very special way—see “How to modify an external schema for an InfoPath form”).
Dave is probably more concerned about his new cloud element than renaming the url attribute to uri. But I will drop this in just he case is has some spare time after sprucing up the Windows UI of his OPML editor. Get well!