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Tim Bray on Microsoft Office
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.'"
The most important question, besides if the MS Word XML format will be well-documented enough, is if it will be the default saving format. Most MS Office users simply don't care enough to save MS Word documents in RTF, for example, even if it's more than good enough for the vast majority of the documents.
Not the main issue on the article, but it is unfair to single someone as the inventor of XML, which is just a streamlined version of SGML which is an evolution from IBM's GML.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
MS is trying to time this right.
Right now they are seeing diminishing sales, possible shrinking market share. Most of the danish public sector is looking to save money using OpenOffice/StarOffice.
MS needs to increase their compatibility with other options, as they would otherwise force customers to convert every single user away from MS at once, instead of OpenOffice coming in slowly.
They can also hope, that their format is setting the standard, and the other companies will have to play catch-up rather than the other way around.
Have you ever seen some complex XML file? Without documentation it could be as difficult as binary to reverse-engineer!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Just because the file format, instead of binary, is "human readable", does not make it more open.
For "any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence" it doesn't make a difference if you read bytes (binary) or XML structures.
As long as you don't get a DTD with extensive comments on how to interpret the elements, along with some promise/guarantee that the DTD won't change every minor release, there is no real improvement at all.
The fact that XML is human readable is irrelevant, since no human shall read the files, but programs such as perl scripts shall. For them it makes hardly any difference; it is only marginally easier since you can use an existent XML parser instead of rolling your own (which is no big deal using the right tools such as YACC).
This 'openness' comes at a good time for Microsoft. They suggest openness in a time that they are criticized and attacked because of file-format lock in. Many 'advisors' shall be mislead, blinded by buzzwords such as XML as they are, and actually believe that this solves the issue.
Because it doesn't matter if everyone is able to read, modify and generate Office-compatible files. People will us Office products in future. Opening the file formats doesn't change anything.
XML makes it easy to create programs that will depend on MS Office. So this only makes it easier to create programs which depend on Microsoft products.
You'll be DMCA'd out of the loop for trying, and the format will validate itself with 'Palladium' features in software, or some such.
However, the mind reels at the idea of managing PowerPoint and Excel files from emacs!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's just like the old SGML module for Word they used to have about 6 years ago. My guess is that there will be some significant drawback to saving documents in XML, such as loss of some formatting information. That would convince users not to save in the XML format... but that isn't the important thing to Microsoft.
More significantly, there might be small incompatibilities, or ways that Word-created XML documents divert slightly from what is normal and proper in XML. Perhaps Word will make some (intentional) mistakes when reading back XML files generated in other applications, just like Word's old SGML module would choke on many proper SGML documents.
Make no mistake: the fact that almost everybody is using Office and the associated file formats makes it very hard for a new contender to enter the office suite market. Microsoft must be aware of the power they have over the market with their Office file formats. Think of it: when you exchange files with other businesses, you have two realistic choices of file formats: Office or plaintext. And now Microsoft is introducing compatibility with an open and well-defined markup langauge, in favour of their proprietary language? I'll believe it when I see it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Perhaps these announcements of XML compatible office file formats are just stalling tactics? MS has done it before.
MS now has a serious competitor in StarOffice/OpenOffice.org. And that competitor has two compelling advantages - it's cheaper/free, and open XML file formats. So when clued-up IT people say to their Pointy-Haired Bosses that they should use StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, PHBs can respond "but MS is doing that next year. We can avoid all the disruption of changing office suites just by waiting a bit and upgrading to the next version of MS Office. Besides, we're already paying for it." Then when MS actually releases Office 11, they will have used all sorts of devious and subtle devices to keep their lock-in of the file format, and MS and PHBs will be happy.
Yes, the point of XML files is that their _syntax_ is simple and easily parseable by computers. But that doesn't tell you anything about the _semantics_ of a document. And as long as there is no proper documentation on what the mess of tags in your XML file means, there's hardly any way for you to hack together a Perl script to, say, extract plain text, or convert the Word XML file to an OpenOffice.org XML file, or whatever else comes to mind.
Just look at an HTML file exported form Word2k.
An excellent point sir. That's a great illustration of how Microsoft approaches 'open' file formats.
People that think that MS Office is going to move to open, well documented file formats are just plain nuts. But look at many of the comments in this forum - it seems MS has even managed to persuade many Slashdotters that they are going to use open formats. Poor fools.
So, what happens when somone want's to email an XML enabled Word document...... Does it somhow become encrypted on its way out of the database, remains scrambled on it's way over the internet, and reassembles itself into nice XML once it arrives on the recepients computer?.... Doesn't sound like XML to me?!
Here's my pet rant:
I would say that XML isn't a markup language - a markup language would allow the "bad nesting", since a markup language should be "layers of virtual highlighter pen" applied to an underlying data stream. XML, since it requires "proper nesting", is just Lisp sexps reimplemented, but with terrible syntax. It's yet-another-tree-structured-data-format. Big Wow. A true markup language environment would facilitate part-structured data, like HTML used to be, rather than shoehorning everything into trees.
Lisp sexps would just say (stuff (things "text"))
In fact, that's pretty much all there is to lisp syntax right there. The above is (a) a potentially valid lisp program and (b) a valid lisp data structure.
XML is a data format designed mainly to allow C and Java programmers to use vaguely Lisp-like processing techniques without realising it and/or admitting it to themselves.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I really have my doubts about wether Microsoft will allow "any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence" to muck around with Office documents.
Why not? After all, the high-quality ActiveState port of Perl to Win32 exists because Microsoft paid for it, and you can download it for free. Not only that, but if you want to write your own code to manipulate Office documents, you have been able to do that for years in VBA - all the Office programs expose rich APIs. In fact, they are composed of Objects that you can instantiate and use in your own programs if you want - all MS care about is that there is a licensed copy of Office on the user's machine. One of the easiest ways to do charting is to simply reuse a bit of Excel, for example. From there it's a short hop via COM to any program you want.
I'm guessing their XML document format will be just as hard to decyper and the current office formats.
The fact that Office documents have been in a proprietary format in the past is actually unimportant, since the interfaces to the applications (and hence their documents) are well documented (check MSDN or Barnes & Noble if you don't believe me). So the reason that Microsoft are doing this is that they lose nothing and gain from making the platform even more attractive to developers.
Okay, so it'll be harder to mount a windows partition effectively, but this doesn't affect transmission of documents, especially if they're stored in an XML format. As for me, I think it's more valuable to have files that I can read outside of their native filesystem rather than have a readable filesystem filled with unreadable files.
Of course, this will never happen. Instead, MS will continue to push their own "open" XML based file formats. Microsoft Kerberos, anyone?
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
With XML Schema and DTD's, you can validate various aspects of the data without writing a custome validator.
With XPath and XPointer you can refer to parts of an XML document without needing to understand what the document contains.
With XSL you can translate all or parts of the document from one format to the other without your application needing to know the structure, and without needing to understand more of the format than the parts you are extracting.
With SAX and the DOM you can programmatically traverse and extract information from an XML file without having to write a custom parser.
With CSS an editor or viewer for instance can use a standard mechanism of applying styles to elements without hardcoding the style attributes for elements anywhere.
With XML namespaces, you can intersperse data in various formats in the same file, and the components handling each of the vocabularies need not know anything about the other components - an example would be embedding SVG in HTML: The HTML renderer doesn't need to understand any of the SVG tags, only that it should delegate contents with other namespaces to another component. And the SVG renderer couldn't care less about the HTML.
And this doesn't even touch on the benefits of all the various interchange formats that have been specified on top of these base technologies.
The importance of XML is that it opens up the doors for building interchangable components that operate on data without needing any hardcoded application specific knowledge of the data.
Most of the time, you still have to write some code to tie it all together, but you don't have to build your own parsers, your own document object model, your own styling system, your own way of handling contained data of other types, your own way of transforming data between formats, etc.
For me as a software developer XML delivered years ago. I use XML technologies daily, and it saves me work.
Except I will look to xml.openoffice.org to write some xslt transformations to take Microsoft office documents and liberate them once and for all.
Once I can move my team of 20 people to open office with no real worries or complaints about 'interchanging' files with lusers still using Microsoft, I will.
BUT, have you ever looked at an HTML file generated by Microsoft word? It is a GREAT example of how they can pollute a standard into something unreadable.
I suspect that they will copyright or otherwise lock up their DTD/Schema, and try to lash out at anyone that uses them in other than 'approved' ways.
Think of it: when you exchange files with other businesses, you have two realistic choices of file formats: Office or plaintext
I think PDF is a viable (growing even) third option. Adobe is "evil" just like MS (remeber Sklyarov)... regardless, PDF is nice and it works well, and the files are way smaller than word docs.
The ISO tried it. It was called ODA
and was a complete failure.
So? Formats come and go all the time. Just because the ISO failed in the early nineties doesn't mean someone else would fail today.
Microsoft is switching from a proprietary file format, to XML, and the first 100 comments are all flaming MS. WTF does it take to make you people happy?
.NET that they can make an entire programming framework (and at least 3 assocated languages) into an open standard and even have them ratified by the ECMA and maybe even ISO. Because of this people have already managed to port Perl, Python and many other languages to this framework before it even came out of beta! The guys at Ximian have even managed to port quite a bit of the framework itself as part of the Mono Project.
They've already shown with
So perhaps instead of perpetually slating Microsoft, you could get off your arse and do something useful instead.
Nick...
So you can read Office documents with other programs as long as you have Office and MS dev tools?
You do see the folly in that, right?
-Kevin
Not that I totally disagree with your point, but with ".Net" people will be discouraged, or it will be far more difficult to send the actual document. My guess is that some future version of Office will default to "Send the shortcut".
Now they of course will change Office for the Mac to read from those servers... The data WILL be stored in XML on those servers, so coders will have an easy time with it.
You bring up an interesting point about paranoid people and Microsoft. I have followed Microsoft fairly closely over the last ~18 years and feel comfortable saying that they have never worked with any "standard" out there. They have ALLWAYS developed their own. Can you name an example of any "standard" software technology they have adopted and not changed? A perfect example of this would be ZIP. Why doesn't Microsoft use it instead of CAB files? There are many many more I could use as examples if you would like.
Microsoft has an internal saying "If it is not ours destroy it".
My point is this. A company that has for 18 years been trying to lock people in to their technology, will cause some people to be a bit paranoid.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.