I have started the XOXO Blog for the promotion of the XOXO microformat. (For those wondering what XOXO is, see my post What is XOXO?) The blog’s template is fully XOXO-paresable and I am working on changeing over my Blogger Comment Syndication service to parse XOXO formated compatible with this new concept, which is only slightly different from my original XOXO code, but is more compatible with other uses. All users of my service will have to switch to this new (hopefully better) code snippet, but I think it will ultimately be worth it. Blogs based off of an XOXO template (I’ll be publishing one and the specs soon. As you can see by looking at the XOXO Blog itself, I’m not much of a designer, but I’m proving the concept first. I’ll get other people to help me with looks later.) will be able to use the service directly with no added code.

Other benefits to the XOXO-template could include :

• The ability to produce better post feeds by parseing the blog main page
• The ability to parse the whole blog for backup/transfer to another service if needed

The XOXO blog itself will soon be populated with different tools, not only to go with XOXO templates, but to work with other uses for XOXO as well.

XOXO is a microformat for the storage and transmission of outline data. Outline data is any nested list information, where you have nodes with subnodes. The specification is similar in purpose to OPML, but has many advantages over that format, including :

• XOXO can be embedded completely within any XHTML document. Since XOXO is really a subset of XHTML, it is 100% XHTML-compatible. It can be stored as an independant document, but this is not a requirement as it is with OPML.
• XOXO has predefined fields for common uses. Unlike OPML where all fields are optional/arbitrary and up to individual implementations, XOXO has standardized markup for TEXT, TITLE, HREF, REL, REV, TYPE, and CLASS attributes. One may argue that feed readers have standardized some OPML elements (xmlUrl, for example), however this is not even wholly true (some feed readers use the rssUrl element instead).
• XOXO can be viewed directly in a webbrowser without any need for extra stylesheets
• XOXO can be used to make up the actual content of web pages so that those pages are nice to view, but are also easily read by other applications/scripts

For conveniance, XOXO is still fully extendable, with the ability to contain any number of arbitrary fields.

For more information, see the official XOXO specification and the official XOXO-faq.