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.'"

Comments

Re:WTF????

[richie2000]

I parsed some Visio stuff and the data was more or less readable.

Visio was just recently bought by M$, they obviously haven't had time to corrupt the file format yet.

Incompatible XML?

[Dexter77]

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!

Is he crazy?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:I can see it now...

[dmiller]

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