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Microsoft Just Says No to .Doc Replacement Panel
Schlemphfer writes "OASIS is a nonprofit consortium backed by top technology companies, and the purpose of this organization is to set open standards for desktop and business software. They've just announced a working group that will create an XML-based document format standard for openoffice.org. And even though Microsoft is a member of Oasis, they aren't going to be taking part in this group. It's a logical move on Bill's part, considering that standardized XML docs are sure to weaken the hold that Microsoft's proprietary .doc format has on business software."
"XDocs," the code name for a new product in the Microsoft Office family, streamlines the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms. The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because XDocs supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, XDocs helps to connect information workers directly to organizational information and gives them the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact.
Straight-up ascii? That's what XML is (and RTF for the most part, except when you want to embed stuff).
And don't even get me started on RTF. Have you ever looked at that crap? I worked on an open source xsl:fo to RTF converter and I'd have to say that RTF is extrememly anoying to work with.
Microsoft has a RTF specification doc. but this is notoriously full of holes and ambiguities. There is a reason that RTF still works best with Office: they don't tell you how exactly to implement it.
It's tremedously hard to debug, ugly, verbose(more so than xml), hard to read. I hate RTF. I've had dreams when i kick it in the forehead and strangle it underwater. But that's just me.
Compare an XML document with a RTF document and you'll see what I mean.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Have a look at this http://www.1dok.org/eng/index.html
The site says : 1dok.org is part of a programme of the Ministry of Economics, Technology and Transport (MWTV) and the Schleswig- Holstein Technology Foundation (TSH) funded out of the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) by the European Commissions GD Regio.
I believe their intention is to base it on OpenOffice format, they want to make it the official office data format for the German government, and may later for all the Europen governments.
Err..umm..UNIX is a proprietary OS. There's a very good reason Linux is referred to as a 'UNIX work-alike.'
Ye Gods, though, go take a look at a 'history of UNIXes' chart. You think Win95 vs 98 vs ME vs NT4 vs 2K vs XP is bad? You kids don't know how nice you have it now adays; even several years ago, at least it was starting to coalesce into BSD versus SVR4.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
"This isn't about Microsoft publishing specs to their .DOC format (which Kotar-Kotelly's Final Decree requires them to do) "
No it doesn't. It talks about protocols, not file formats.
Because XML is highly compressible, use of XML does not necessarily increase file size. The Gnome apps that use XML data formats store it compressed as gzip; I just took a typical small Excel spreadsheet, which takes 20.5 kbytes in Excel format, and saved it in the Gnumeric XML-based format: it's 3K. Uncompressed, it's 37K, but that doesn't matter, as the uncompressed format is never kept either in disk or in memory all at one time.
.doc is a simple dump of the memory state,
False. The ".doc" format is definitely not simple. It's also not a raw dump of memory, it's objects that have been serialized into OLE structured storage, which you can think of an evil twin of the already evil FAT file system.
Probably one of the *least* robust file formats I know of
Yes, that's true.