How the directory on XML-RPC.Com works

Tue, Apr 10, 2001; by Dave Winer.

The directory 

A perhaps little-known fact about the directory here on www.xmlrpc.com -- it's an (imho) innovative use of XML. Here's the source code. I edit the directory in the outliner that's baked into Radio UserLand. Here's a screen shot.

I can include directories maintained by other people, as I do with the list of implementations of SOAP on the SoapWare.Org directory. It's maintained by Paul Kulchenko, the author of SOAP::Lite for Perl. Paul has a web app that generates the data in a format called OPML.

OPML is the native file format for the Radio outliner. Over the years we've had lots of text-based export formats for outlines, I've done five outliners, but this time we decided to do two things differently:

1. The native file format would be text-based and

2. That format would be XML.

That's all working and deployed now, here's more info on editing directories in Radio:

The outline runtime in Manila 

Anyway, completely separate from Radio, a new part of Manila (to be released in Frontier 7) is a directory runtime. It renders the OPML source as a navigatable tree-structure of web pages, as exemplified by the XML-RPC directory. In fact, every Manila site has this feature, and there are lots of directories scattered around our community. We hope to have them coalesce at some point into a top-level directory at SuperOpenDirectory.Com, which is a UserLand site, but here's the cool thing about the way it works, like the Web, there's no reason for there to be a single top-level, in fact one could include any of our directories, such as xml-rpc.com, in other directories, hosted on other servers, in other scripting environments. Every directory is available as an OPML file. For example, here's the OPML underneath the XML-RPC directory.

Philosophically, I think the Web has always been held back because directories were centralized. I want to see as many roots to the global directory as there are websites. Maybe that's hoping for a lot, so I'll settle for more than Yahoo, DMOZ and Looksmart.

Anyway, the reason I mention this here is twofold:

1. This is a smart group of XML-savvy people and I think this is an interesting use of XML, and

2. The XML-RPC directory is open on both ends. It can be included in other directories, if you'd like to, please do. And from the other end, it can seamlessly include other directories, so if you'd like to volunteer to keep one part current, or produce an OPML rendering of content you're already maintaining, we are ready to work with you. It's a bootstrap, and bootstraps can be fun.

Dave