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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.'"
Yes Microsoft, Open Standards really are kind of cool, arent they?
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
I guess they trust on Palladium to make sure that XML-files can only be read and written using MS software.
-- Cheers!
Visio was just recently bought by M$, they obviously haven't had time to corrupt the file format yet.
Money for nothing, pix for free
It's very easy to make an XML document that can't be processed with any common parser library. It will make programmers work extremely hard if they have to make different XML parser for M$-XML.
Now if the M$-XML isn't compatible with the standard XML what's the use? You still have to save it in M$-XML format to be able to use it with Word. If most coders want to use M$-XML it might even brake down XML standard since there are more Word documents in the world than XML documents put together!
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.'"
so a new software release will "magically" convert every document ever made to XML? I dont think so. The fact that they will finally have compatability with the rest of the planet is nice, but I'll bet a $100.00 that they will bastardize xml to their liking just like how they did it with IE and HTML.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is probably dead-on, except it will be:
<document type="word">
<ole><![CDATA[ (linenoise) ]]></ole>
</document>
I.e OLE blobs embedded in an XML container
I've been wanting to process word docs with my perl scripts for years, and they fscking know it. They don't have to have some down the road conversion to XML to allow me either, all they have to do is open their fscking standards. What I wouldn't give for a microsoft word document api on linux that was reliable instead of what we have: reverse-engineer peices of cruft that enever get things quite right.
Since they haven't opened up in the past, I don't expect them to know either. Either (1) the project will get buried, (2) Microsoft will use a subverted MSXML standard somehow to make sure it's not usable by us, or (3) the xml documents will be encrypted and protected by Palladium so that your only hope of realizing this perl promise is to use a licensed copy of Microsoft Visual Perl#++.
11*43+456^2