Paul's given a good summary of all this. As he says, there are two things: an XMLTV format (which, personally I'm not a fan of - I think it's over-engineered and certainly not conducive to the rapid display of a listings-magazine style web site - hence not using it for the back end); and a project called "XMLTV" which defined the format and also provides a set of "grabbers" to obtain files in xmltv format from scraping remote sites.
Overengineered. By this do you mean: "overengineered", or "doesn't work for my needs"?
I have no issue with the latter, but it's not really the same as overengineered?
XMLTV usually provides a whole ton of info that I don't think is available from Bleb (stuff like actor info?) I personally use all this extra info in my web tv guide and hence prefer the radio times website grabber. The xmltv format tries to accomodate a wide variety of formats, and not just stuff for UK channels, so I guess it's more flexible.
But at the end of the day, it's XML based, and so it should in general be easy-ish to to translate one format to another if the info is actually there.
Also, I fail to see why the exact format makes a difference to you generating your main pages? Since it's basically static, surely you just generate them once and store them?
Thanks for bleb. Keep up the good work! Ed W