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Heads-up: OPML 1.1 coming shortly
Fri, Dec 21, 2001; by Dave Winer.
Update: January 24, 2005 
At dinner on Saturday night with Technorati's Dave Sifry, he asked where the spec was for OPML 1.1. I hear this frequently enough that it's time to answer the question, even though I think it hardly needs to be addressed.
First, if you do a Google search for OPML 1.1, it takes you to this page, originally posted in December 2001, where you can read that there was a heads-up on the addition of a <cloud> element to OPML. We were going into the final stages of releasing Radio 8, we had made this enhancement so that Radio's outliner could support Instant Outlining, a very cool application of outlining; and I wanted to get this on our to-do list for after shipment.
Of course there was an immediate outrcy about this, along the lines of who-does-he-think-he-is, and I guess every time I thought of doing something about it after that I always chose something else, because truth be told, I hate flames and flamers. I felt that anyone who wanted to know what OPML 1.1 is would know where to look and would find a clear-enough explanation.
At the same time, two other things happened. We changed our IO implementation to first use polling, and then use instant messaging, so the cloud element, while an interesting idea, was no longer necessary for our work.
The second thing that happened is that I got really sick and had surgery, followed by a long recovery and when that was over, I didn't return to UserLand. I think almost everyone knows this and has cut me some slack on things like this, but some people apparently don't know about it, or worse for them, don't care. There was a very real human reason why this project and others got dropped.
Now after all that, if you're wondering what to do -- if you see an OPML 1.1 file, you should treat it like an OPML 1.0 file. That's it. Enjoy!
Anyway, what follows is the post from December 11, 2001. I think, combined with this note, and with the Google pointer, you now have all the information anyone could possibly need about OPML 1.1. If this is not true, send me an email, and if I have the information you need I'll try to post it soon.
The original post
Good morning OPML-Dev'ers..
We're getting ready to do some interesting new things with outlines, and along the way I wished we had had the foresight to put a <cloud> element in the <head> of <opml>.
Background: We added <cloud> to RSS in version 0.92. It allows a server to implement update-notification, a lightweight publish-subscribe mechanism that works over various Internet protocols.
Now we want to do the same with OPML documents. I think it will be even more interesting than the linkup with RSS, because of inclusion, you can have something like a workgroup outline that updates in real-time.
We're using such software at UserLand to manage the company now, and it's nothing short of revolutionary. It's made our work much more enjoyable, so much so that I wonder how we ever developed software before.
The first version of this software, the stuff we're using now, was done with XML-RPC as the connecting glue. It was just a step on the path. A few weeks ago I realized I could do it all with just a <cloud> in OPML, and have a more robust, faster and better distributed system. That's why bootstrapping is so much fun. You get to throw out all your code and start over every few months. 
We're experimenting with this now, and will start doing the full implementation in January. I wanted to post a heads up that we will post an addendum to OPML called 1.1, with a new optional <cloud> element of <head>, Murphy-willing of course. You may start seeing 1.1 files showing up, and wanted to be sure there was a place to point people to say what's up.
Have a great holiday one and all!
Dave
PS: This statement is public and on the record, you may point to it from your site if you want, I have not decided if I will point to it from Scripting News right away.
PPS: Here's an example of an OPML 1.1 file.
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