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Tim Bray on Microsoft Office

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-things-where-you-least-expect-them dept.

jgeelan writes "The co-inventor of XML, Tim Bray, has been talking about the newly XML-enabled version of Microsoft Office, code-named 'Office 11' and tells XML-Journal that 'when the huge universe of MS Office documents becomes available for processing by any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence, all sorts of wonderful new things can be invented that you and I can't imagine.'"

8 of 495 comments (clear)

  1. Well Excel in Perl is pretty easy now by twoshortplanks · · Score: 5, Informative
    I've used the excel reading and writing modules for Perl with great success. They're easy to use and do the job. (there are also simpler interfaces if you want them too.)

    Or you could go the whole hog and use a SAX writer like XML::SAXDriver::Excel to create the documents from XML yourself.

    (This is not to say I don't think XML native formats arn't cool and will have many uses, I'm just pointing out what you can do now.)

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    -- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
  2. Re:Historical turningpoint? by BurritoWarrior · · Score: 4, Informative

    IBM release th framework in which to do so because of the governmental investigation they were under at the time.

    They didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, but they did indeed do it. It wasn't the complete bios though so Compaq had two teams...one team looking at the specs, and another (that could never look) building a clean room implementation.

  3. How to convert Word to XML by Korth · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've recently been reviewing a dozen of different software to convert from Word to XML.

    So far the best tool I found is upCast (free for personal use) from http://www.infinity-loop.de/ .

    To convert a Word file:
    * Use Word's AutoFormat feature to convert visual formatting to Word styles
    * Redefine all the text as Word styles
    * Run upCast to convert to XML using the "XML (content, no DTD)" filter
    * Run HTML Tidy from http://tidy.sourceforge.net/ with the parameters -xml -utf8 -clean -bare .

    Other tools that might be worth a second look:
    * Majix (Open Source) - http://www.tetrasix.com/
    * WorX SE - http://www.xyvision.com/
    * XML MarkupKit (in German) - http://www.eds.schema.de/download/MarkupKit/
    * DocSoft LLC Word-to-XML - http://www.docsoft.com/w2xml.htm

  4. Re:HTML from Word by superyooser · · Score: 5, Informative
    True. Just a couple days ago, I saved a doc as Web Page in Word (Office XP) hoping that some clipart would be saved in a web-friendly format. (This was originally made in Publisher, NOT by me.) It didn't work; it saved the images as .wmz! For the web?!

    Anyway, there was tons of gibberish in the file, but it displayed fine in IE6. It was a completely blank page in Mozilla! Nothing at all! We always knew the XP didn't stand for cross-platform, but I didn't know it was this bad.

  5. There is some documentation of Office XML already. by frleong · · Score: 5, Informative
    Here at MSDN

    It is simply not what others is claiming: <?xml version="1.0"><data>blahblah</data>

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  6. OpenOffice is XML, now! by magi · · Score: 5, Informative

    Doing XML stuff with OpenOffice is supergreat. It took me half-an-hour to study the format enough to write a XSLT parser that extracts all strings from an OO document.

    Now I wrote, just for demonstration, the following XSLT example in just a few minutes, useable directly with xsltproc in Linux.

    The example prints all the Heading paragraphs in a OO Writer document, indented according to the header level.

    <?xml version='1.0'?>
    <xsl:stylesheet
    xmlns:xsl="http: //www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:office="ht tp://openoffice.org/2000/office"
    xmlns:style="htt p://openoffice.org/2000/style"
    xmlns:text="http:/ /openoffice.org/2000/text"
    xmlns:table="http://op enoffice.org/2000/table"
    xmlns:draw="http://openo ffice.org/2000/drawing"
    xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.o rg/1999/XSL/Format"
    xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.or g/1999/xlink"
    xmlns:number="http://openoffice.org /2000/datastyle "
    xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
    xmlns:c hart="http://openoffice.org/2000/chart"
    xmlns:dr3 d="http://openoffice.org/2000/dr3d"
    xmlns:math="h ttp://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"
    xmlns:form="ht tp://openoffice.org/2000/form"
    xmlns:script="http ://openoffice.org/2000/script"
    version='1.0'>

    <xsl:output method="text" encoding="ISO-8859-1"/>

    <!-- Print all headings, indented. -->
    <xsl:template match="text:h">
    <xsl:value-of select="substring(' ', 1, (@text:level - 1) * 2)"/>
    <xsl:text>* </xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="text()"/>
    <xsl:text>&#xa;</xsl:text>
    </xsl:template>

    <!-- Don't output any other text. -->
    <xsl:template match="text()">
    </xsl:template>
    </xsl:stylesheet>

    The result would be something like:

    * Top-level heading such as a chapter
    * Second-level heading (section)
    * Another section
    * Subsection
    * Subsubsection
    * Yet another section

  7. Tim here with a bit more background by tbray · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've seen the native Word XML format (alpha mind you, so it might get changed). It isn't exactly pretty, and if I had to write code to extract all the paragraphs that contained the word "foo" in bold it would give me a bit of a headache, but I could do it.

    The word "foo" in bold single-underline looks something like

    <r>
    <rf>
    <rp class="bold" />
    <rp class="underline" lines="1" />
    </rf>
    foo</r>

    Yeah, it's pretty verbose.

    Near as I can tell, it is 100% round-trip-able, i.e. you save as that file format, you read it in again, you hit ctl-S and it saves again; about as good as a native format. Now someone needs to write some script-ware to run Word in batch mode to xml-ify server directories with zillions of office docsl

    I think the reason MS is doing this is obvious. Look at their financials - they *really* need people to upgrade to the new version of Office. End-users don't buy Office any more, CIOs and the like do. These people are just not gonna be impressed by another new word-processing feature, but they might be motivated to upgrade if they thought that they were opening up all their data to re-use by other programs.

    I expect that with any luck we'll get a secondary industry built around doing cool unexpected stuff to Office docs. Don't want to sound over-excited here, but a huge amount of all the intellectual capital in the world is sitting around in Office docs, and this makes it noticeably more re-usable. Has to be a good thing.

    Cheers, Tim

  8. Re:Yay Evil Monopoly Of Doom! by donutello · · Score: 5, Informative

    What a bunch of pseudo-technical garbage!

    I have a Masters in Computer Science with a focus on databases and storage technology and very little of what you said makes any sense to me. There's nothing easier than getting at data stored in SQL. Where I work, we've shipped a few products where we didn't document the schema because it was too complex and we didn't feel we could support it. Within weeks, almost all of our major customrs had it reverse-engineered anyway. SQL is very easy to get at!

    kernel level SQL data

    There's no such thing. SQL data is stored in tables. You use queries to get at it. Period.

    Also, your story doesn't make any sense. The article says Office 11 is in Beta already. IIRC, the SQL Server and Palladium stuff in the OS doesn't come until Longhorn. Do you think they will actually release a version of Office which won't work until their next OS (who knows when that will be) is released and adopted? How will they make money off all the people who recently upgraded to Windows XP then?

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    Mmmm.. Donuts