I wondered why so many people were visiting knitml.com all of a sudden. Now I know. :) Thanks for all of the feedback on the project. I hope lots of people will join the effort.

In response to Al's post (6), the point of developing KnitML is not to create an alternative to reading knitting patterns for humans. Rather, it would serve both as a way to express a knitting pattern as an algorithm that a computer can understand as well as provide an interchange format for software communication.

If you prefer to read charts but a pattern only provides written instructions, you have to manually get out the graph paper (or spreadsheet with fancy fonts) and chart it yourself. If, on the other hand, you have the KnitML for the pattern, you can use your rendering software with the "always chart when possible" option set to transform the pattern into a chart.

And if you prefer to do your math by hand, by all means don't use software that would provide a transformation. The point is that there are plenty of knitters out there that do not like math that, given the chance, would prefer a piece of software to do it for them.