Rowan Nairn points to Gareth Stack of Technolotics who believes that OPML underlies the future of both the browser and the web.
Firefox 3, or its equivalent, won’t function primarily as a traditional link / url -> page display browser, rather, users will navigate through outline directory trees to reach their ultimate content destination – which may be any of a whole variety of open document types, inclusive of audio, video, and traditional text / graphic / interaction models. Nodes will be linked dynamically, and updated at numerous trusted hubs.
Gareth is absolutely right. If you're using Firefox at the moment just do a quick Ctrl+b to display your bookmarks sidebar. What if each of those folders was an OPML node? And Firefox automatically synchronized the hierarchy with an OPML host like OPMLworkstation?
Now, imagine that you could also search and import the hosted bookmark directories of other Firefox users and splice them into your structure. It would be very much like Kosso's OPML Manager, only built into the browser. It would be drag and drop simple to build and share your own directory structures with the whole world. A truly distributed DMOZ would flower overnight. A thousand different DMOZs, customized and personalized according to user preferences, assembled lego brick by lego brick. A distributed DMOZ for the Live Web incorporating Live Bookmarks (RSS feeds) as much as static web pages. Perfect feed grazing fodder.
Dan MacTough, the creator of the feed grazer Optimal Brower, was apparently thinking along the same lines when he offered a tool to translate your XBEL bookmarks to OPML. Its useful for the bootstrap but of course we really need this functionality baked into the browser. C'mon Mozilla, support OPML and help us to build a massively distributed network file system.
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