Gee - what a shocker. OPML, yet another underspecified format that Dave Winer created, isn't as interoperable as people would like. As is par for the course, everyone is gushing about how great an idea the OPML sharing thing is, while tip toeing around the suckage:

First, I exported the group of feeds (the channel) from FeedDemon. That created an OPML file. Yet when I tried to upload it to Share Your OPML, I got an error that the file contained no feeds. I looked and it did - all the feeds were there.

So I then opened that OPML file in Dave Winer’s OPML Editor, did a ’save as…’ and then looked at that file. It had one thing the original didn’t - the <opml version="1.1"> container as the very first line. Uploading that new file to Share Your OPML worked without error.

So yeah, as I've said before, OPML just sucks. If the idea behind "Share Your OPML" takes off, I fully expect the following to happen:

• Various XML experts will start to notice the suckage, and point out what needs to be fixed
• As with RSS, Dave Winer will champion the suckage as a feature
• Various stupid work-arounds will be created by implementors, all of which will vary slightly
• Finally, a new format will be proposed to fix the problems
• Dave Winer will act stunned, and take it as some kind of betrayal.
• Meanwhile, his various enablers will refuse to call BS on him

Gee, it's almost like I've seen the movie before.