As much as I love XML files and the way that browsers display them with their little plus and minus toggles, a file is no good to me unless I can read and utilize the data it contains. So while OPML is great for storing link and feed data, I can’t really navigate an OPML file the same way I could a browser-generated quasi-HTML bookmarks file.
Thinking that someone else had to have run up against this problem by now, I was somewhat surprised when I couldn’t find any easily-accessible XSLT for transforming OPML to HTML; there was one page that everyone was linking to, but it is apparently MIA. There was also a page that dealt with creating an HTML blogroll from an OPML file, but I wanted something that would handle nested folders, HTML links, and RSS feeds.
So keeping that in mind, I present for your approval a stylesheet for transforming OPML files into cleanly presented lists of links and feeds (in HTML). My bookmarks are an example of a transformed file; the only change needed was to add the reference to the stylesheet at the top of the OPML file. So check it out, but don’t pay any attention to the folders full of Care Bears links. Those are for some, uh, research I’m doing…
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