Brainwagon summarizes the issues with OPML (and with RSS, for that matter) better than I did - I wish I'd written this:

Scoble likes to champion first RSS and now OPML under the claim that they are good for users. What would be good for users is for the deficiencies of these formats to be absent, or at least invisible. They are not. They manifest themselves in all sorts of edge cases which prevent interoperability. I've spent a great deal of time reading RFCs for various networking protocols and formats, and by comparison the RSS and OPML "specifications" are scribbles on napkins.

Scoble's attitude reflects what I think of as the Microsoft way: it doesn't matter what's underneath as long as what's on top looks shiny. Sure, it will belch smoke, require servicing by a third party every three thousand miles and occasionally make strange sounds that will puzzle and worry the owner, but look how shiny it is.

Read that second paragraph again, and then go read this. The problem with OPML, and with RSS, and with MetaWebLog API is that the specifications are loose. Not just loose, heck, they are basically non-existant. I'm going to do something now that'll surprise a lot of people - I was wrong about a bunch of the crap I gave the Atom group. Ideally, Atom wouldn't have been necessary. But Winer is such an incredibly difficult person to work with that a bunch of people who would rather have tightened up the RSS spec (you know, into an actual spec) went out and created a new syndication format.

Sure, over the time they spent on that, they had a lot of "Angels on the heads of pins" conversations. It seems to me that such things are endemic to standards groups though, and they did produce a specification. And - unlike RSS - if you look at the Atom 1.0 spec as an implementor, you know exactly what it is you need to do. That's simply not the case for any of the formats Winer has created and championed over the years. Yes, RSS has been (and is) very useful. It will continue to be useful. It could have been a lot easier, if only Winer were willing to accept reality.

So let's get back to users. Scoble has a follow up post here - where he summarizes:

James Kew, for instance, asks "why can't a reviewer say something sucks?" OK, I buy that. But, usually Ebert and Roeper have something better for you to see. In this case, I have an app. I have a demonstration of what I want from TechCrunch. I want it too. Is there something better that meets my needs? Give it to me.

The crappy format is good enough until someone comes up with something better. And that's what you're all missing.

Remember the link I put way back at the top of this post to the "broken windows" post from Scoble? Longhorn is very, very late - and a lot of the reason is that MS let a bunch of developers run off with loose (or absent) specs and implement stuff as they saw fit. What a shocker - the pieces didn't all fit together. Well heck - what the do you think we have now with the "crappy format of the week" situation? We have a bunch of pieces from various developers that don't all fit together - and since we don't all work at the same place, we can't toss everything out and call a do-over, like MS did.

So yes Robert - as a user, you ought to give a damn. The reason people have trouble coming up with applications that interoperate well is because the baseline formats that are out there suck eggs. I'm done giving the Atom people crap - they were right, and I was wrong.