In a previous life, I was trying to import content from a Movable Type blog into Hayfever. Then I wanted to write an importer from Hayfever into Wordpress. And wow the MT import format is nasty. Things that have annoyed me, in no particular order:

• There’s no charset considerations in the spec. I care deeply about explicit charsets nowadays. I’m sure the implementation does something with them, but what?

• The DATE atom is an annoying US date, with no timezone information.

• The whole serialization format is just nasty. The Wordpress importer, for instance, splits records on ‘––—nAUTHOR:’, which is presumably much more reliable (in the case that there are lines of ‘-‘ in the data), but is a fairly nasty assumption that bit me quite badly for my own importer.

• The PING and COMMENT atoms seem to contain nested sets of atoms, but this isn’t indicated in any sort of general way - you just have to know that PING is special.

I’m just grouchy, I guess.