This may look strange

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

We're working on a new XML-based format for outlines.

What's an outline? Well, it's a long story, which for me, goes back to the
mid-70s.

http://dave.editthispage.com/outlinersProgramming

Anyway, there's a lot to fill in. We didn't stop working on outliners when
we sold Living Videotext to Symantec. In fact, Frontier is one huge outline,
with many thousands of sub-outlines, scripts, menubars, structs and arrays,
all of which are edited using the outliner. Twelve years of programming and
lots of outlining. They're really good for editing hierarchies, imho.

I use the outliner to write Scripting News. Every other XMLization we use
loses some of what's already in the content. Here's the new file, it's
rewritten every time I update Scripting News.

http://www.scripting.com/xml/currentOutline.xml

If you want to play on the other side, seeing if this makes sense as an
aggregation format, or whatever, give it a shot and let me know if it works,
even better if you have a URL I can send Scripting News readers to. It could
get recursive, it might even turn into a fractal. (Hehehe.)

A few caveats. Ignore the <rules> sections, or if you want, use them.
They're explained on the Pike website, here. The <a href>s are encoded using
&lt; and &quot;. Is this the right way to do it? I think it's pretty good,
but I'm not sure.

http://pikebeta.userland.com/rules

We're going to build a bunch of web apps around this format, this is just
the first, and probably the simplest. At this point I can answer some
questions about where we're going, but not all of them. But I've shown
various XMLizations in the past much earlier than this time around. More
people are involved so I wanted to be sure our ducks were reasonably well
lined up before showing the work.

Hope you find this interesting, I think it'll go to some cool places. It may
make sense to discuss this format on this list, or it might be better to
start a new list. Let's see how it goes here.

Dave