LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Mike Gratton <mike@vee.net>
  To  : <ilox@airnet.com.au>
  Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 12:48:08 +0930

Re: [NEWS] Microsoft limits XML in Office 2003

Ian Loxton wrote:
> So much for supporting an industry standard. Deja vu anybody?

Well, it's not like they're completely dropping it. However I think this 
forthcoming support for XML in Word is quite vastly misunderstood - 
probably by about 99.99% of everyone who has heard of if. People seem to 
be equating "XML support" with "using XML as it's native document 
format", which does not follow at all. Regardless of whether or not you 
get the version that has "XML support", the native file format will 
still be a mangled, crapped-out, pseudo-XML format similar to that used 
by Word 2000 and XP. You still won't be able to read native Word 
documents with a normal XML parser. You still won't get easy 
cross-word-processor-application compatibility. The forthcoming XML 
support will not change this situation at all; Word documents will 
continue to be a closed format.

Word 2003's support for XML should actually be quite good - you define 
an XML Schema (which defines the structure of the document), give that 
to Word, and it lets you author valid XML documents based on that schema 
in some sort of visual way. This is *very* important - it gives the 
world a useful XML editor which may even be usable by the masses. It 
also means that Word2003 should be able to edit any sort of XML 
document, provided you have a schema for it, which in turn means you 
should be able to edit OOo documents, or documents conforming to the 
open document format that is being ratified by Oasis, all in Word.

If we're lucky, it may let you define rudimentary styles (using CSS if 
we're really lucky) for XML elements allowed by the schema so that 
people editing the XML documents get some sort of emulated WYSIWYG 
environment, but I'm not sure if that will be the case.

Now, all this is nice, but only really useful for those who care enough 
to do proper structured document editing (instead of the arbitrary 
WYSIWYG crap that so many people/companies produce these days). Those 
who care will be large corporations, governments and specalists such as 
technical writers or people working on documentation projects. Those who 
*won't* care are home users and small businesses - they want to produce 
some result in the quickest, easiest possible way, and writing good 
structured

So what MS is doing is fair enough - they're leaving out a feature that 
typical home/small business users will not need and as a result they can 
charge more for the corporate version which does have this feature.

They still suck because they're be using a native format which is 
closed, but if we're going to bash Microsoft, we need to do right. ;)

/mike

-- 
Mike Gratton <jabber:mjg@jabber.vee.net> <http://web.vee.net/>;

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