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Is the New Microsoft Office Really Open?
joesklein asks: "From CNET, there is an article about the new Microsoft Office 11. In summary 'Microsoft says it's opening its Office desktop software by adding support for XML--a move that should help companies free up access to shared information. But there's a catch: It has yet to disclose the underlying XML dialect.' Could this be grounds for another anti-trust suit against Microsoft?"
it supports .DOC, the de facto standard for documents. What's this XML you're talking about?
But there's a catch: It has yet to disclose the underlying XML dialect.' Could this be grounds for another anti-trust suit against Microsoft?"
No.
"In summary 'Microsoft says it's opening its Office desktop software by adding support for XML--a move that should help companies free up access to shared information."
Are we talking about true standard XML is Microsoft going to "embrace and extend" it?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Well if the way Microsoft Word saves out as HTML is anything to go by, then concise it most definitely will not be.
At least with XML it will not be very long until many software companies and project reverse engineer the XML. I suppose they could put some weird binary or encrypted data in the files, but that would defeat the purpose of XML.
Maybe they'll get it right next time....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
RTF has been in office for years and it is an open, portable standard readable on many platforms and with many programs. The problem is that Microsoft chooses to retain their obfuscated binary format as the default save type for documents.
If the XML files office produce are not made the default save types or if the XML merely encapsulates large portions of binary code, it will not matter one lick that office can save these xml documents because the majority of people will be stuck on the default, unreadable formats.
Is it open? Yes and no. They meet some of the standards and then add some of their own. Embrace and extend: the Microsoft strategy for market domination since day 1.
The big question (to me) is whether Microsoft can put a legal encumbrance on the XML schema they use for a new file format. Could you publish a schema but have it so wrapped in legalese that (for example) open source projects could not be allowed to use it ?
Once again MS will embrace a standard, only to warp it enough that you get stuck using their version anyway...
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
I'm going to be the pessimist (realist?) and say we can probably expect an "embrace and extend" maneuver from Microsoft. Allow Office 11 to use XML + some "Microsoft Office extensions" and .NET support, and then watch as businesses use it over standard XML...
Illegitimi non Carborundum.
"XML dialect"?
:)
It's called a schema.
Talk about embrace and extend. Sounds like this will be more "XML-like" than real XML...
Would be that it will be "open" to other Microsoft technologies. This has been their method of operation in the past. As long as you only have a Microsoft environment everything works well with each other..
*narf!*
At what point did anyone NOT see this coming?
-- My HARDWARE, My CHOICE.
Now, just think of the many ways they can screw around with XML. I bet IE and other MS readers will only do real basic XML validation, too. Then we'll have people telling other XML readers that their tools should be as understanding to bad XML as MS products.
Yes, mister Hairtrigger, we should sue Microsoft simply because they won't release trade secrets. We will surely win.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I've always said the XML Emperor has no clothes: all XML is is a meta-framework for markup languages. No more, no less. And pointless if schemas are never disclosed.
Could this be grounds for another anti-trust suit against Microsoft?
No it is not...
The Bush administration made it clear on the first day they wanted this to go away. As long as Billy isnt taking your 401K im sure no one is going to bother him for a while..
How many Millions were spent on this farce? and for what? a verbal reprind from the judge? think about it.. all that money could have gone into tanks and bombs to bomb other countries and free us all from "terror"
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
Lets all pile on the one company that drove home the standards for the PC industry for years, and made sure that there would be one common platform that everyone could write to, and achived critical mass so there wouldn't be conflicting standards anymore....
For those who are clueless its supposed to be funny...paraphrasing MS themselves...before you troll me, at my comments in the past about good old M$....
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
No matter what microsoft does, all they will get is a slap on the wrist. Microsoft will just point to staroffice and openoffice and say, hey, there's compitition, its not a monopoly.
Big deal if they don't open it up anyway (I don't really expect them to), staroffice/openoffice will crack it to a certain extent anyway. For most people's file conversions, its not that much of a difference to convert documents. Doesn't always look pretty, but it works fairly well.
Wake me up when something Microsoft does is suprising...
There are a couple of good articles on this at InfoWorld. Try here and here.
Good quote:
THE GOOD NEWS is that Office 11 supports XML Schema. The bad news is that XML Schema has been described even by XML experts as "confusing," "impenetrable," "fuzzy," and "as user-friendly as a stick in the eye."
So long as there are no proprietary additions to XML from Microsoft and as long as the "open" XML format MS will use is truly open for all of us to see, and not an XML tag with binary data in the middle at every possible point, as some other have suggested before.
I will give props to MS if they will work with other companies in a fair way to do this.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
Your anus opens YOU.
Could this be grounds for another anti-trust suit against Microsoft?
/. in the past twenty years, from EULA alterations to Palladium.
Of course it could. But so could any bit of news about MS on
But "could" and "is" are differnent things. I suspect MS will decide that closing XML will render it useless, and make it at least as open and useable as their MS-HTML files.
So, at the worst, we'll have a new "save as" option that's bit sloppy--but since MS won't have to extend XML to get their office functionality, they probably won't do it just to spite a few OSS coders who'll figure it out in a year anyway.
I will bet all they will do is create an XML schema for the COM serialize function, since that is pretty much all any Microsoft application does when you select File->Save - it just calls the COM serialize function with the output pointed at the disk.
So, you will have a file that is nominally XML, but is nothing but memory dump of the COM object.
Technically, XML. Actually, COM.
www.eFax.com are spammers
<document>
<content>
kdjf348o0jOIJ*$)J@#ijfO34ijf9o84j2193
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fijsjhF*(WU(*@U#IOJWEFJW)*OEURWIOJO:W
</content>
</document>
"Open? Sure it's open! Just click here... and *poof* your document is open. What's that? You mean you want to open it with something other than M$ Office? Oh, well in that case maybe not..."
As mentioned in a previous port, M$ did their own thing with converting Word docs into HTML. I tend to believe that this is going to happen again, this time with XML. I hate to see technology with two parallels: The one that standards boards such as IEEE create, and those that M$ reinvents just to earn a few more bucks. It's disgusting.
"This food is problematic."
"'Microsoft says it's opening its Office desktop software by adding support for XML--a move that should help companies free up access to shared information. But there's a catch: It has yet to disclose the underlying XML dialect.' Could this be grounds for another anti-trust suit against Microsoft?"
1. They have the document spec closed
2. No legal repercussions!
3. They make it more open. (of their own free will)
4. Antitrust suit!
5. ???
6. Laughed out of court!
That great, wonderful even. Hopefully it's not Microsoft just using XML as a springboard for saying the equivalent of, "see, we're a good dog, and we're using open standards now," to cloud the judgement of any non-technical committee/court/public speaker that may attempt to point out their obvious monopoly.
Meanwhile, myself, the company I work at, and the fire department I volunteer at will continue on with Office 97, happy as clams. Well, some Office 2000 too.
Is there anything else of value they're going to bring to the table with Office 11? More speed, smaller disk footprint, free beer?
But there's a catch: It has yet to disclose the underlying XML dialect
Remember, you can also save a Word document as an HTML file, however the HTML is so digusting, so non-standard that the only things that could possibly read it are more Microsoft products. The same, I would presume, will be happening to their XML feature.
Additionally, its not too far fetched that Microsoft would make their own DTD (Document Type Definition).
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
Mod this down please
No uncommented links to porn pictures on slashdot please. Its also offtopic
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
And these other apps can cut into Office revenue. Which is as good a cease-and-desist argument as any.
I suppose they could put some weird binary or encrypted data in the files, but that would defeat the purpose of XML.
It defeats nothing if every app speaks the same binary/encrypted language. It prevents other apps from conversing with Office stuff, and that's probably seen as a good thing for MS.
Anyone who thinks MS is using XML as their file format for the purpose of being "open" or playing well with others had better find another daydream. They're doing it because it helps them in some way, not because it'll help others. And there's actually nothing wrong with that. They're in business to protect shareholder value, after all.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
...do links to Goatse get modded up as "Informative".
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
How - and why - should it be ? AFAIK, MS never disclosed their e.g. Word or Excel binary formats, so why should they be exposed if they fail to disclose, or even obfuscate, an XML schema ?
Insofar as I understand MS isn't under any court order to open their file formats, just not to continue with specific unethical tactics on others (wristslap.) So if MS claims they're using XML in Office v.11 (hey, didn't they claim that about Office v.10 too...) big whoop-de-doo, it's really their decision.
Actually it's remarkable MS is even going for XML at all. MS's own internal formats are a terrible mess, the code that produces it apparently such a tangle MS has terrible trouble keeping on top of it, now trying to put this all into a new format has got to be a monster. Doing all of this while keeping all of the MS'isms and editing features and not breaking every other part (both theirs & third-party) that uses these services & components has got to be daunting.
Yeah, it'll likely end up being idiosyncratic and quirky full of all the bugs MS is famous for but hell, a semi-legible format has gotta be better then the stuff MS pumps out now. Of course this whole "beta" process we're in right now has been pretty conclusively demonstrated to be a marketing sham with the significant decisions all made and the feature-set frozen long ago.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Technically, it is standard XML.
Oh come on, the link wasn't even hidden. If you don't know about that site address by now, you shouldn't be on the internet.
1) XML, SOAP and all these new technologies were pioneered by Microsoft
2) They killed all the standards they didn't pioneer (CORBA anyone ?).
3) There is NOTHING in the XML spec that _requires_ people to open up their schema definitions. Its purely a structure definition in the same way as Microsoft's old Word documents were stored, its just that now the markers are in Text format and any standard XML parser will be able to read the file.
4) Open Office can already read word documents even though they aren't in XML.
5) So can Word Perfect.
6) Using XML doesn't stop you embedding binary into the document, often people do this to store data (images for instance), thus an OLE reference might still be binary.
7) Pure XML and XSLT are great ways to use up all the power on your processor. Binary has previously been used here because its inefficient, if MS had opened the format up everyone would just complain that its too inefficient and its quicker to save using an older format. So MS are either trying to burn cycles or are customising the XML or their application for speed, is that wrong ? Would it be wrong if KDE did it ?
8) People won't switch to or from Word because of XML, Open Office and other tools will be able to read the Word files because other tools (Google for instance) need the format and MS can see real business need to allow them to see it.
9) XML is a meta-language as such anything can be written. Hell they could have a bitch of an external format and then a simple parser that makes it useful, but not tell anyone about the simple parser so everyone elses documents take years to load.
10) XML is the buzzword of today, OLE to be replaced by SOAP as the buzzword for Office next ?
Get off the high horse guys, whether its binary or XML is irrelevant, making something XML doesn't make it open. Thats like saying that everything you do makes sense, but just because people don't understand the Mayan Calendar and Ancient Greek they complain.
MS will always use Mayan and Ancient Greek, and we _can_ understand them, its just easier for them as its their native language and calendar.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
WTF!?! Was the existing .XLS, .DOC, .PPT format the basis of the first anti-trust suit? NO! You Microsoft-bashers just can't get it straight, can you?
This moment of frustration brought to you by the holiday season.
Check out our infosecurity industry blog: http://securitymusings.com/
for obvious reasons
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
Will this be anything like Ms's wonderful HTML? with so much bloat you can barely even see the content? maybe encrypted XML? One of MS biggest advantages is Office, not just because it is a decent program, but because "everyone" has to use it since "everyone" else sends stuff in .doc format and there isnt really a good way to open them (Openoffice, etc. usually cant handle complex formatting). I really doubt MS would make their formats more open and readable by competion's products
That is probaly what will happen.
Technical compliance, while completely avoiding the spirit of the standard.
Of course if I was MS, that is what I would do too.
"Could this be grounds for another anti-trust suit against Microsoft?"
Only as long as people continue to use the definition of monopoly, as stated in the dictionary:
1. COMMERCE noun A company you do not like because of a product they made; who has complete control over their product's market supply.
It's not more open than .doc because XML is mainly a buzzword.
asswipe
I'd say the title of this article (Is the New Microsoft Office Really Open?) is extrmely misleading. Microsoft isn't even trying to be open, they're just adding support for another opensource language. A true open program would have its source code available. What this article is about has nothing to do with that. Microsoft Office is closed. Period.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
Microsoft (and Netscape) essentially tried the same thing with HTML. Sure, we're using HTML, but to actually view our HTML, you have to use our browser.
Adoption of a "standard" is no guarantee of interoperability. Understanding the conceptual underpinnings of the standard is just as important. The question is, when Microsoft says they are using XML as a document format, are they doing it because they believe in the principles underlying it, or solely for the cynical "this is what is selling now" aspect?
The body of HTML out there is an paresable, babble of a mess, largely because the two dominant browser makers did not respect many of the underlying notions of markup and hypertext to begin with. The state of the art progressed, but not in the way a lot of people wanted it to go.
This could bode poorly if the meme survives somehow that the Office format is now equivalent to XML. When it "doesn't work," who knows where the blame will fall?
"Old man yells at systemd"
The issue here that really comes out to play is that this is a customizable language. There are some groups trying to put together a standard, but as far as I can tell if they invent their own standard they're within their right.
Can't help but state the obvious here... XML is now targeted. It is in Java's position, only as far as I know without any licensing issues. Oasis might help to standardize for anyone in the open-source community, but M$ is clearly making sure they get everything else before others do.
It's like the article says, Office is thier cash cow. They're not going to let some open source movement mess with it. Not when they can make more money.
----- I want my LART.
If I see a single or tag in any document I make, I will go down to wherever they make office and personally shove those CDs up their asses.
How about Microsoft Visual XML++?
If it doesn't exist now it will...
or something sufficiently based on XML
that it can have XML in the name,
but sufficiently different to XML that
its incompatible with XML from other vendors and developers will need to learn a whole new way of working with XML.
Just a wild guess.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The Office file formats will be open if M$ decides to:
- Document them, and
- Not change them with every update.
I doubt they will do either of those things.rubbi$h
in my non-coding mind it seems that it would be easier to reverse engineer something not entirely based on proprietary code.
It's a "Jump to Conclusions Mat"! You see, you have this mat, with different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO!
Here's a novel idea... why don't we wait until they RELEASE the specs? Then complain about it?
85% of Americans think this signature sucks
you're still a polesmoker
XML formats YOU.
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[?msxml version="1.0"]
-[office11]
-[drm]
[backwardcompatible]No[/backwardcompatible]
[linux]Evil[/linux]
[profit]$$$[/profit]
[globaldominationmode]On[/globaldominationmode]
[/drm]
[/office11]
The problem is that Microsoft chooses to retain their obfuscated binary format as the default save type for documents.
Comments like this give me the creepies. As a software developer, the last thing I want is some entity telling me what my default format should be.
It's also indicitive of the elitist attitudes of many Linuxites. In effect, the poster is saying that users will never have the capability to inform themselves and make a choice as to how they want to use their computers.
If they really wanted to join the open market and truly compete, then they would just open the .doc format. This is nothing more then a pitiful pandering to open source advocates or those businesses that are interested in OSS. Any person with a shred of common sense and a basic knowledge of technology developments over the past 5 years can plainly see how pointless this is.
From: Richard Stallman (RMS@MIT-OZ@mit-eddie.UUCP)
...!mit-eddie!RMS@OZ ...!mit-vax!RMS@OZ
Subject: new UNIX implementation
This is the only article in this thread
View: Original Format
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards, net.usoft
Date: 1983-09-27 10:35:59 PST
Free Unix!
Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.
To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.
GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent
display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen.
Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages. We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol, far superior to UUCP. We may also have something compatible with UUCP.
Who Am I?
I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.
Why I Must Write GNU
I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.
So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.
How You Can Contribute
I am asking computer manufacturers for donations of machines and money. I'm asking individuals for donations of programs and work.
One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power.
Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.
If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time. The salary won't be high, but I'm looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money. I view this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to working on GNU by sparing them the need to make a living in another way.
For more information, contact me.
Arpanet mail:
RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA
Usenet:
US Snail:
Richard Stallman
166 Prospect St
Cambridge, MA 02139
Something in my gut tells me that beyond all the extraneous tags, attributes and data types, the XML is going to have a hash code built into it.
.NET server at MS hosting? Nah, this cripples offline Office. Keyless hash?
Edit this file outside of MS Office (invalidating the hash code) and suffer the consequences: MS treats it as "untrusted" input and rips out only the text content, no formatting.
The hash will be a giant number created through a secure portion of the Intel-ish hardware calls. Keys hidden where? That'll be interesting to see who posts 'em first. Perhaps on a
Curious Curious.
mug
That would be like Slashdot actually investigating articles before posting them.
Guys, April is months away......
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
Dancing MonkeyBoy doesn't hop across a stage for his health. He "loves this company" because it makes money as only a monopoly can.
Silly rabbit. Open is for kids.
Never trust a multimillion company.
I realize it's a joke, but it seems to me that mucking with an open standard and then closing it in order to extend their monopoly might just be a reasonable cause of action. XML is not a "trade secret," and making their version incompatible with the rest of the world's in order to force the world to adopt MS products is not "innovation." Reminds me of what they did with Kerberos a couple years ago. This may or may not be worth a lawsuit, but it would certainly be anticompetitive of them.
Nope. Microsoft can set the price of Office because the applications fullfill the needs of its customers. The fact that the file format is propietary has little if nothing to do with it.
The last time I saw StarOffice running on Windows, I damn nearly puked. It's written in something that looks like Java/AWT, the apps take bloody ages to load, opening a document takes even more bloody ages, the UI looks childish and the printing sucks. And I didn't really spend much time with it.
OTOH, the Office apps load damn near instantaneously on even a PII 450, opening even ~50MB documents with hundreds of embedded images never takes more than a few seconds, the GUI is consistent and tight, and the things just work.
Sun (and everyone else) has a problem if it thinks that it can compete with Office on Windows with that stuff, and unless they provide an alternative to VBA, they'll never even make a dent. There are hundreds of thousands of people who write full-fledged bussiness applications using VBA and aggregating Office functionality, and that's not something that a company will just throw away because the file formats are now compatible. w00t.
If anything, opening the formats up will increase the popularity of office suites in Linux, because people won't have to dual boot or whatever to a) be productive; and b) read the stuff that the rest of the world produces.
MS Software will NEVER be open. MS is all about closed proprietary systems people have to pay money to use.
Sooner or later Bill will grabe the Internet. I don't know how he's going to do it, but if there's anyone smart enough to do it it's him.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Does everyone remember how Office 10 was promoted as the BIG XML release? And now Hailstorm has disappeared too.
Ha...its open if you pay microsoft a nominal fee of 1 billion trillion dollars
But there's a catch: It has yet to disclose the underlying XML dialect
Sure they did. Its XML, just like you stated in your post. Mistery solved. Oh, did you mean the schema (if so, thats not a dialect)? Wait, I know. Maybe its not done yet so they are waiting to publish.. Na, cant be that simple... Or could you just be paranoid...
As I never tire of pointing out, the "science" of economics in the United States can be summed up in three sentences:
1. Charge more than your competitors - price gouging.
2. Charge the same as your competitors - price fixing.
3. Charge less than your competitors - price dumping.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Microsoft's embraced-and-extended RTF cannot be read by AppleWorks, aka ClarisWorks. When MS Word encounters RTF from AppleWorks, it doesn't parse it right and you are left with gobbledygook. MS and standards are an inherent contradiction.
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
This is a monopoly. They have been found in violation of Anti-Trust laws and held up on appeal. The government has a legitimate reason to tell them how to conduct their business and every right to do so.
Simply because the Anti-Trust trial focused on the OS rather than Office software, does not mean that the government has no reason to impose restrictions to keep MS from shifting their monopoly power. MS's monopoly has been under government scrutiny for almost 10 years, but we still get a bunch of posts on here about how the government shouldn't be able to tell 'a company' what to do. Either the trolls are really busy or you guys decided to skip Economics 101 for Libratarian Fanaticism 101.
In order to maintain a capitalist system, we must have competition. Without healthy competition, we don't have capitalism. The government has an obligation to step into an otherwise free market to ensure that competition stays healthy. There is no magical 'Free Market Fairy' that is going to come along and restore health to the industry.
So yes, depending on the result of the States' AG cases and the DOJ's settlement, MS could very much be liable for making their document formats some sort of completely bastardized XML. If you want to know the probability, then you should go read the settlements, and the grievences in the new filings against MS.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
the Love Caculator demonstrates that
Draw your own conclusions. cute little widget.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I seriously doubt that Microsoft is opening anything that they previously held private. This just isn't Microsoft's way. They've previously held .DOC, .XLS, etc private and obscured them to the point that 3rd party programs have a difficult time accurately opening them. This has worked fairly well for them, but it is also a thorn in Microsoft's side, as each new version of Office needs to hold compatible to all that legacy stuff, plus the new formats.
What if they could scrap all that and have an easily read document format? They could tighten integration with IIS -> Office and web pages generated from saved documents, spreadsheets, etc. An XML file format can do it. This would be something MS would like to do.
The problem is XML could be readable by anyone. Or at least it CURRENTLY could. But, what if, MS had a technology to transparently encrypt/decrypt files on the save/read? And, what if the keys to those files were then stored in a protected memory vault that only trusted apps could get to? A trusted nub could ensure that the apps weren't tampered with... You can see where this is going.
As I understand it, with Palladium, MS could declare that the next Word format is PlainText, but documents still wouldn't be able to be opened by 3rd party software, as they aren't trusted by MS to hold the keys to decrypt the data files.
It's a win/win for Microsoft. They get to dump legacy code and create something simpler, while gaining greater control over how people use their own files. It's a win/lose for the consumer, though. They'll get new functionality if they stay all Microsoft, but will be locked into an all/nothing choice of whether they choose the MS route, or not.
THAT, to me, sounds like a typical MS business plan.
I assume that Microsoft will argue that the 'standard' is 'open' to interpretation... ;-)
Even with grep replace tools, cleaning up this crap takes hours.
Hello World.
I think the MS logic goes something like this:
1) Convert MS file formats to XML.
2) Tell everyone you're using XML, and since XML is an "open standard" then clearly all XML documents are open, right?
3) Never, ever, ever tell anyone what should go in the XML docs.
4) Change the "standard" often enough that 3rd party companies are never able to read the files.
I think if you replace "XML" with "binary" then you have the current MS plan. Just because they are using XML doesn't mean they are open. In this case, XML is just as open as binary files, since 1s and 0s are an open standard, right?
right.
-nate
This is ripped from another board where a beta tester posted it up.
The dog ran up the hillThe dog ran up the hillThe dog ran up the hillDogRanUpTheHill
XML, as a language spec, is most certainly open. It's what you do with the spec that makes it closed. C is also an open spec, but if I write a program in C, I'm by no means obligated to give everyone the source code to it (despite what some people here insist is the "right thing to do" in all cases.)
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
One thing that nobody seems to have considered yet is the possibility that, not only might this new XML Word Document format not be "open" as currently being assumed and touted, but it might be less open than the binary junk that Word spits out now.
.DOC is too open (meaning well-understood with a large base of source code to process it). They have stated as much in the article. MS Office is now becoming "just another Office Suite, same as the rest." They want Word to be "less of a commodity".
It seems from the context of the quotes in the article, Microsoft is very much concerned about how interoperable Word documents are now that they have been reverse-engineered and implemented from scratch in OpenOffice / StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc.
Here's my theory:
Besides value-added features, such as the internet calandar and workgroup features that have been dropped, the best way to achieve this differentiation would be to engineer an incompatible default format (an obfuscated XML DTD or binary encoding format) for new Word documents, leverage their massive installed base of desktop users, and fire up the good-ole FUD-o-matic 9000...
Boom! Office 11 Ships, creating new, incompatible format with new, incompatible documents floating around the LAN, marginalizing the use of Open Source / "fringe" Office software.
MS FUD: "But Open Source / Free Software Word Processors just don't work properly with the cutting-edge features of Office 11!". "They don't have the new whiz-bang features like 'Enhanced' XML, which Office depends on."
No, Mr. Hacker, you can't use Open Office. The company policy is for everyone to use Microsoft Word, because we want everyone to be able to read everyone's documents. By the time the OSS hackers completely reverse engineer the file format, the damage will have been done. And the few glitches in compatibility in engineering compatibility into OSS Office Software will be more fuel for the FUD fire, emphasising how buggy open source software is, and Microsoft is the best choice for 100% correct display and authoring of Word Documents for your MS Office-Run Business.
And until Office 11 ships and they're ready to roll with this new spin, they can take advantage of the hype regarding XML and how wonderful their new file-format will be, see, this Open Office package isn't so special! We can do you one better! XML is designed to be Open, see?
Then, in reality, the new document format will be more closed to us, because we don't know how to read it. Trust me, they won't make it easy. They gain too much by closing up the new format and throwing away the key, profiting from the time it takes to pick and chisel away at the locks.
NetShadow
Business and personal users are starting to wake up to the fact that storing valuable, durable information and knowledge in proprietary file formats is not a good idea. Internet formats and communication standards illustrate the power of widely-adopted technical standards well. Business documents, technical documents, personal records, photographs, music, movies -- anything that may be of value and interest in the unforeseeable future must be stored in an open format to retain that value.
I think this is a more compelling "pitch" for open source that the usual line of "if you can't get the source you can't fix the bugs".
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w:line-pitch="360"/></w:sectPr></wx:sect></w:body> </w:wordDocument>
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word
Urx Earm Alloa diaolig!!
Hello World.
Did they mention Extensible Markup Language in the article or could it be one of these???
- eXtra Money Language
- eXtremely Microsoft Language
- eXtra MuddLed.
- eXtraneous Markup Language
- eXtrapolated Modded Licensing
- XBox Machine Language
- XDocs Monopoly Language
Can someone clear this up? I don't have to time to tinker with the whole "reading articles" concept.
This space for rent.
Microsoft Office opens YOU!
this is an excellent point.
I wish I had some mod points for you; that's exactly what Microsoft means when they say that their documents are saved using XML. They include Win32 class-ID objects all over the place.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Given that by default, Corel WP, not MS Word comes installed on home machines by HP, Gateway and even Dell, it's hard to say that MS has a monopoly on Office software anymore.
HP and Gateway switched a few months ago, and last time I checked a week or two ago, I saw that the same is true with Dell.com also.
Now, this is partly irrelevant. Office is an overwhelming majority among PC users/owners now, and especially dominant in the business world. Still, it is encouraging that the major OEM's are at least emboldened to offer non Microsoft productivity software for new systems.
rj
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
... it doesn't mean that .DOC isn't the default document format. When the Average Joe is confronted with the "Save file" dialog box, if he sees "Microsoft Word Document format" in the box, then .DOC it goes. If he sees something else, it goes anyway.
.DOC format is the default format, nothing's going to change an inch. Plus, the fact that they state that XML is now supported for document types, doesn't mean that it will even write documents to XML. Either way, I think nothing changes.
As long as the binary
Not to be a zealot, but this is Microsoft we're talking about. If this was going to move they office desktop monopoly even a fingernail back, do you'd think they would make this move anyway?
.nosig
I'd say wait and see what happens at release. Anything developed off of assumptions made based on the current state of the product will most likely be broken at release anyway. If it isn't released at ship time, then worry. Until then, it's kind of pointless to ask for the stuff.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
From the snippet: "But there's a catch: It has yet to disclose the underlying XML dialect.'"
Just because the XML dialect isn't readily available people are already assuming MS will not make it open? Got news for ya, Office 11 is still in beta, that means things may still change. And as you all know, MS publishes an absolute shitload once they set their mind to it.
So, chill out a little, will ya? Wait for it, then bitch when it doesn't appear. It's almost like you guys are new at complaining, or something.
Bill gates paused in a grocery store line to let someone in front of him. We're not sure what he was up to, but we noticed he didn't let any other customers in front of him. This could be a deliberate attempt at gaining another monopoly in yet another critical area, and we're pretty sure it has to do with cash register printers and XML. Could this be the Achiles heel that brings down the giant in the courts? Citizens arm and unite!
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Just take a look at the rest of it, without the spaces. Or copy to your editor and remove them yourself. It's still ridiculous, atrocious and pathetic.
That's the problem. Microsoft is not obligated to release the info on their format. As a convicted monopolist, they should be. This is yet another example of just how poorly our judicial system handles this kind of case. By the time you can prove something and get through all the appeals, it doesn't fucking matter anymore!
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I'm not trolling at all, I'm asking a legit question. Why should Microsoft have to open up anything, file formats including? Since most people here are Capitalists and agree with most of Capitalism and "free markets", isn't it contradictary to Capitalism for MS to have to do this? Opening up anything will only help their competition. Yes you can then say if they're such a good and innovative company it won't hurt anything, but that is simply not true.
I would like some proof of their "EVIL" business practices. MS got their monopoly because no one else really wanted the business. Did Sun, SGI, or DEC really produce any consumer oriented applications and computer systems? Their was DR-DOS and Wordperfect, but where is the proof that MS forced them out of buisness through "EVIL" deeds and not because people liked MS's applications better?
If I was in the business of making some application and everyone bought it, why the hell would I want to share any of my application with competitiors? This is capitalism and has anyone here really thought of taking this "openness" to other worlds of business. How about automotive manufactures start opening up their new car designs.
While I'm all for opening up everything and sharing of information, it really goes against Capitalism. You can't open up eveything and have business. Fuck selling "support" of your product. Your product is probably very shitty if you can survive off of support. I'm ignoring "consulting".
Are we talking about true standard XML is Microsoft going to "embrace and extend" it?
Your forgot the "subvert and control".
Its "embrace, extend, subvert and control."
Has the rtf spec been kept up to date as Word doc formats have changed?
I had the feeling the existing spec was old and outdated.
As far as I can tell Word 11 hasn't shipped, so why is it so bad that they haven't given info about an aspect of a currently unavailable product? It's like worrying a date will dump you and then yelling at them with out actually knowing.
"How dare you dump me"
"huh? what are you talking about."
Paitence Is.
The software maker says it plans to disclose additional information on Office 11's XML schemas, possibly when the update ships next spring.
Sounds to me like they plan on telling people when the functionality is actually usable. While it may not be the "ideal" timeline for some I see know problem with it. You get the functionality you get the outline of the XML.
Maybe I missed something in the article, maybe Word 11 has been out for a while already, if I have I apologize.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
If Microsoft keeps its schemas proprietary, looking at the XML code will make it easier to figure out one's own schema than the way it is now figuring out the binary Word format. But people likely will still want to save in the default Word format, instead of XML. Hmm, using the XML output may make it easier to decode the Word format. That would be nice. Microsoft is not going to give away its advantage, but I think they are confident of their market share to let things become just a little easier for the other word processors.
Now one thing that wonders me again and again is that people really think XML will make all data exchangeable. Face it, XML is nothing more then a container, as is .AVI or even tar archives.
The interesting question is, what is inside the container? Well documented, or even standardized data or just one huge CDATA chunk?
XML can be useful if you want to create software that needs to exchange data with someone else because you don't have much discussion about encapsulation, support under most operating systems and there is a big chance that even the data transfer just uses port 80. Beyond that XML is just a buzzword - but I must admit, a long living one.
Yes
And bear in mind that XMLDocs are not likely to be simple because word processing documents are not simple. People grouse about Word HTML docs but most of that complexity was necessary to create a HTML document that accually looked like the original word document. XML docs are unlikey to be all that concise because users are going to be unwilling to sacrifice layout and formatting features just in order to have the resulting document be pretty looking XML
You could create a word processor that simplified and structured its features toward creating nicely structured HTML but then it would be FrontPage and not Word.
Not only was RTF never fully documented, but different versions of Word had incompatable RTF readers.
If you examine an RTF file you'll notice all kinds of redundant codes that are put in to cope with incompatable MSWord versions.
Fully design, fully document a protocol, Microsoft?
I just spit out my drink.
Rocky J. Squirrel
It was in nice pretty format... but damn slashdot kept throwing up:
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
So I had to put up the abomination that you see. Yes... Slashdot added spaces as it usually does, I'm not sure how to prevent it from doing that.
You have no e-mail address so I can't send it to you, and I'd rather avoid posting a public link and slashdotting my friends servers. So you'll have to take my word for it.
All of the other "example" postings are trolls. This is legit. Well for MS Word anyways. I don't know for the other office components (Powerpoint, Excel, etc).
I'm aware that it will ugly as heck... which is fine since it will be parsed by the machine.
Someone will end up with a leaked alpha or beta copy of Office 11 and start working on the file format. If they will be able to figure it out fast enough is the question. It's possible, but if it's not done completely enough by Office 11's release what you describe will happen. Someone else said that Microsoft won't change .doc anymore partially because Google supports returning .doc's in search results... of course that just requires stripping all formating, which would probably be pretty easy.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Works pretty well too. I guess it's bad enough that they had to make a special menu item for it.
This might explain why Microsoft is going to buy Macromedia.
TTFN
What I am hoping/expecting for in this new format is something like XSL:FO plus binary sections for ActiveX controls, etc.
For the 5 or so posters saying this will be something like:
I highly doubt it. They are on record in several places as saying they want these new files to be indexable and parsable with standard tools, and base64 encoded blocks I am sorry to say, are not indexable. But of course Embedable objects will probably be forced to manifest this way.Regarding the claims that this will be like their horrid HTML implementation, I think it is clear you've not done much work with XML. Either a document is valid or it is not. If its not valid, most parsers will simply reject the file (unlike HTML, which just deals with the problems). If a document is valid, there should be no tool that doesn't properly load and parse it into the DOM, unless it is somehow broken!
The question for me is how well they implement content-presentation seperation. Will there be a 'Word 11 XSL file' with the actual content of the file seperated nicely into tags like
or will the style and content be mashed together like so: This is the question I want answered more than anything, and I can't wait to see which way they go with it. If everything is seperated nicely, we may just have an excellent source for user-produced well-formed xml documents which can be integrated into XML-based content management systems with PDF-based presentation and HTML previews, etc.Insert foot
#1 isn't illegal unless is in need of an emergency #2 and 3 are relative to competition. But I never heard of price dumping, since thats how you compete. Product dumping would be charging way too little, like giving out the xbox for free. which i think they are in violation of.
Any reply to this will just be speculation, simply because we don't know. We don't know what Microsoft is going to do. They may make it completly open and standard or they might not, but as of now, we don't know. Why is slashdot encouraging this kind of worthless speculation?
What signature defines me as a person?
I think it's a more practical question. The principle of what you say is clear, and I agree. But this isn't about principles. This is about playing fair, which involved the known rules, published as the law of the land. If an industry can't work within itself to achieve a minimum amount of interoperation -- allowing the government and other flexibility in the tools they use and total ownership of thier own data -- then the government will come in an impose defaults and a lot more. If they don't have a principle handy, they will invent one. Simple matter of pragmatics and power.
Interoperation is good for the consumer, one of which is the government which should not risk losing control of the data it encapsulates with software tools. The Government knows this. The companies know this. Ignore at own risk.
Do I support pragmatism over principles? Not really, but I don't see how the world could actually function any other way, principles are too brittle, unprovable, and in the end, often apparently arbitrary.
-pyrrho
I'm sitting at my programming job now (reading Slashdot, I'm a slacker). XML was added last minute to our 1.0 release and some classes were serialized to XML by serializing MFC objects into a CArchive, then ascii-hex encoding the resulting binary into a string and dumping it into an XML attribute. How's that for human readability? I wouldn't be surprised if MS does the same.
Of course they're gonna put object IDs in there. How else is OLE going to work? One of the strengths of Windows is you can embed virtually any application in any other using OLE. Word has been doing this since the Windows 3.1 days, so they're not going to stop doing it now. And they're not gonna break backwards compatibility just so their XML looks nice.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
I think I'll just point to something I wrote a long time ago, at the time Microsoft first announced XML support but before the US Courts gave Microsoft unlimited license to do as they damn well please.
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
As for making it the default, if it isn't the default, it won't work. Not only do most users not understand how to save in other file formats, if it isn't the default, it probably will be too buggy to be used. None of the non-Microsoft formats in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel are really usable for day-to-day use because they lose formatting or worse.
Look here using a browser that will display the raw xml nicely formatted - IE works fine, supposedly Mozilla does too but I can't seem to get it to work; it parses the file and just displays the text.
Shame this is all so hidden away in the story.
They are claiming the documents will be viewable in any browser -- which leads me to believe they will be translating them via xsl into something more viewable than the xml they're in. It seems to me that even if they never disclose the xml schemas, that this hypothetical xsl file would be very instrumental in reverse engineering them.
It's this kind of rampant negative paranoia that keeps Linux and Open source from succeeding. You yourself could have written an office program using the same amount of energy you used writing the completely uninformative and unjustified rant.
Dr. Love thinks that a relationship between microsoft and linux has a reasonable chance of working out, but on the other hand, it might not. Your relationship may suffer good and bad times. If things might not be working out as you would like them to, do not hesitate to talk about it with the person involved. Spend time together, talk with each other.
D'oh!
The rules are indeed different for convicted monopolists, or even companies that dominate a market. It's OK for you to release a broken version of XML for your office suite, it's not necessarily OK for Microsoft.
This is especially easy to understand, presumably as it doesn't have to worry about the average user wanting text to look exactly as it did on his screen.
Same as before, some browsers should format the xml source nicely. If not, this source is neatly indented so 'View Source' and you'll still get it pretty-printed.
Oh, thanks to twistedemotions for sending me this stuff.
Then why even bother with XML? Why pretend that it's some kind of an open format? Why not just stick with the proprietary format they have now?
War is necrophilia.
Totally flexible & open, supports just about any format...
Wow, what a lot of false information. Maybe this will help a little. Disclaimer: I am XML Activity Lead at W3C, so I have a bias.
The new Visio is using SVG.
The new Word lets you use any XML vocabulary you like. How obfuscated it is is *entirely* up to you.
It's not using base64 to put binary propietary data into XML documents. It's using plain XML.
It's well-formed, and Word appears not to make up thousands of elements. The person in charge of this project is actually clueful, and was in the W3C XML Working Group (1996-1998 by the way).
The tools all use XSLT extensively.
It wouldn't surprise me if you could get Word to read and write the OpenOffice format just fine. There's a restriction that you can't re-order content in Word right now, I think.
People claiming to have "insider info" and then posting blatant falsehoosd, or claiming you can put binary data directly in XML, aren't helping here. Even if you get high from hating Microsoft, the open source community and Free software world need to understand that the goalposts have moved a little.
The extent of corporate assets tied up in memos, reportsand other documents is very large, massively higher than the collective value of relational databases.
Yes, it looks as if Microsoft has suddenly discovered XML just as they suddenly discovered the Web. In fact, they were involved heavily in XML from the start, were among the first to ship commercial support for XML, and have been working on XML in Office 11 for a long time.
--
Liam Quin
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
A short quote:
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.''The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
All I've been reading about on Slashdot is that "the *only* reason that our company is still using Windows is because Office file formats are proprietary. We're tied to Office and Windows." Now, at least at this stage, this is the BEST possible fucking news, and everybody is still bitching. Nothing is more open than XML. That's all we know right now. Office data may be in completely open, standard XML. There's no telling what it'll look like, but there's no possible better news to hear than the Office formats may be wide open.
Yet, everybody's still bitching. I have a feeling that what it is is that all you l33t *nix gurus are finally gonna have to put your money where your big fucking mouths are when the format is open, and you're gonna have to actually move to OSS/StarOffice, etc., and you're still looking for reasons not to.
You'll have to ask Microsoft why they hav a suddern desire to switch everything to XML, I have no idea. The current proprietry format is actually pretty clever, it has to be when you consider what can go in there (just about anything).
I'm guessing that Microsoft are viewing this as start of a transition to XML. As I understand the current format, if you copy and paste a CorelDraw drawing into Word at the moment, its Corel, not Microsoft who decide what goes into that section of the Word document. In this case, there is no way for Microsoft to XMLise this part of the document. I've no idea how they're gonna do it unless the dump binary (Base64 encoded?) into the XML. They also need to store the object ID so the Word knows which legacy app this chunk of binary came from.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
Most rational specifications are for performance. The method should not matter as much as the end result. Fire codes are an extreem example, but even there the specification is flexible. The local government does not tell people how to build buildings, only that there needs to be so many exits per so many people and floor space. They don't nail you down to real specifics. Most rational specs are such as mil-specs for acryilic - it must be able to sit in the South Florida sun for one year without delaminating. How you make the thing does not matter, so long as it does what it should.
By these rational and objective standards M$ junk generally fails. If you say that a Word doc should be legible and keep it's formatting for a number of years, Word fails. The same thing can be said of all other M$ junk - it's designed to break and therfore government should reject it's use anywhere records are kept. That's all public work. That's hardly engineering the document, it's simply stating the thing should work as advertised.
All normal standards, from ASCII to WWWC are formed by professional agreement. Governments intervention is not needed. Disruptive vendors are generally seen through.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It would be quite easy to make the M$ document xml format propriatry. Make all default generated documents have linked in components like some ActiveX HTML pages. You might be able to read the base parts of the document but that won't make it very userful without M$.
its not too far fetched that Microsoft would make their own DTD
Nope. They already said they aren't supporting DTDs, only schema. That means you won't be using Word to author DocBook documents anytime soon. The DocBook toolchains are the standard for most open-source publishing, and so far there is no DocBook schema, only DTD.
Unfortunatly with everything in a proprietary format you then end up having to build scripting languages into everything making all of your data files potential entry points for malicious code.
Either that, or build features into applications that expose parsers to the existing scripting languages on the machine. On Windows, this would usually be Jscript, VBScript, or any other WSH language interacting with COM objects; on Mac OS 7-9, AppleScript and Frontier can talk to any Mac program supporting high-level events.
Will I retire or break 10K?
MS is pure monopolistics evil empire.
MS uses all kind of cloak and skins to diguise and fool the vendors for the pass 15 years.
MS only goal is to run the whole information age.
you cant for instance have binary-encrypted elements
Oh yes you can: just put a doctype, then <word xmlns="http://xmlns.microsoft.net/office/11/word"> , then a block of MIME encoded data, then </word>. If not, what in the XML specification prohibits this?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The nice thing about XML is that it is fairly easy to derive the DTD or XSD from samples of the XML. XMLSpy will do it, and even MS Visual Studio will generate an XSD from a sample XML file.
Granted it doesn't help with embedded binary data 0x567f or tell you what GARF=5 means. But there is nothing to stop you from saving the text of your choice (with the attributes of your choice), and see what comes out. I believe in crypto-analysis this is called a plain text attack?
I guess the cool thing now is to put the tagline "Could this be grounds for another anti-trust suit against Microsoft?" on every Microsoft story, even when the context has absolutely nothing to do with anti-trust.
Huh.
INFIDEL! XML is newer, faster, smarter - XML is better.
Allow me to introduce you to my supervisor.
Pr0n-boy is on to us. Nothing left to do but zip-up and go find girlfriends.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
I read through the article yesterday. Damn that sucks, MS has set another standard that shouldn't exist in the first place. What the hell is new. The only difference between this and Java is that someone owned Java. Now Microsoft gets a chance to butcher without remorse or circumstance. The only thing that seems to piss me off is that all of us geeks are too busy bitching over then standards of how MS can do it, rather than concentrating on how to bring the software titan down. If everyone here seems to know so much about programming and XML, join up with OpenOffice.org and get starting on making the superior office product. Meanwhile, low-life pirates like me should do our best to spread the word of open software and distribute the goods to the public. Now quit your bitching and let's show how much the world doesn't need to rely on Bill G and the bald jumping jackass Steve-O B.
Place something witty here
Simply because the Anti-Trust trial focused on the OS rather than Office software, does not mean that the government has no reason to impose restrictions to keep MS from shifting their monopoly power. ...
I thought Microsoft said the Office WAS part of the operating system...
I want to be alone with the sandwich
* Not change them with every update.
...don't you mean improve them with every update?
I want to be alone with the sandwich
am sorry but you clearly don't understand the technologies that you are talking. XML is not a format or a tag set or anything analogous to HTML.
.NET the possibilities are limitless.
>Since formatting is the whole point of XML
XML is a method for marking up data. XHTML is a display tag set for XML markup. XML has nothing intrinsically to do with formatting.
>>or it just ain't xml at all.
>While technically correct, the point is sadly irrelevant. As long as MS is effectively a
>monopoly XML will be whatever they say it is, for the majority of people.
MS might be a monopoly in the desktop area but that is mostly irrelevant, the major advantage of XML usage is in business data management. This is an area Microsoft wants to move into so they will have to comply with the standards or there data won't work with existing systems.
>>Also you aren't allowed to put binary data in an xml document
>Not true. It's recomended that you don't put binary in an XML document, but nothing
>prevents you from doing so. This is exactly what will give MS the ability to hijack the
>standard.
An XML document must be completely composed of character data. If it contains anything else it is not an XML file. While it is possible to encapsulate character encoded binary data in an XML file Microsoft would not do this because it is bulky, and not a very good way to make there documents proprietary.
>>In conclusion they would have to break XML pretty hard-core in order to make their
>>doc types proprietary.
>Only in spirit, I'm afraid, but that will likely be enough.
You are both wrong. ActiveX style linking to components would allow them to make the format proprietary very easily. If you combine this with dynamically loaded components using
>>Besides, then what would be the point of going XML in the first place?
>To make documents searchable. This is an ability which is extremely valuable to
>anyone who has a large amount of information they need to access. The upshot is that
>the actual content will likely be plain text, though important markups may not be.
>Sadly, format is more important than content for a lot of people.
If MS uses the above-mentioned approach they can also use the format to leverage their server technology. Only MS servers will have access to the components that are needed to understand the content of the documents.
Microsoft is switching to XML because it will become the standard data exchange format of all things .NET (other than source code, obviously), and because it is faster and simpler to parse.
After the format wars between Office and WordPerfect--the wars to make each incompatible with the other, I have heard the Office format described as:
"...is not just a data format. It is an entire world philosophy in and of itself. It is more complex than a space shuttle, more confusing than trying to complete the Fourier analytic proof of quadratic reciprocity."
I've seen Office 2000 corrupt two of its own documents twice in the last two months. This may be why.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
XML is just a more verbose version of what is already in the RTF. Its got the same parsing problems and XML just makes bigger files. If you want to see why XML is bad, research Knuth's comments about parsing in TeX. A complete parsing solution will diverges in two directions, one require an infinite amount of memory, the other an infinite amount of time but I don't expect modern computer "experts" to even know who Knuth even is.
Word files are RAM dumps. The memory is allocated, uh, oddly and chunks are scattered all over and over and over (because parts have been re-indexed but not yet over-written or garbage collected.)
If you don't know the scheme, you haven't got much of chance of re constituting the document. Even if you DO know the scheme, it still bites. In fact that's why versions of Word files are incompatible. Not even M$ can do that properly. (Actually its because they'd need to have redundant implementations of code to perform the same functions from the different versions. Its easier to turn that incompatibility into a marketing lever.)
The streaming I/O performance is actually quite poor compared to that of WordPerfect. And they lock up the files so you have to use DDE or OLE to get at the actual text stream.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
...not as in can of worms.
In other words they're involuntarily providing the bare minimum of interoperability that the marketplace demands. News for nerds to yawn at.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Microsoft was convicted of monopolizing the PC operating system market.
MS Office is not an Operating System (no more than emacs is, anyway)
You might as well say that, because MS is a convicted monopolist, they should buy everyone ice cream.
I'm not an XML expert, but my understanding is that MS or anyone can write proprietary code into the CDATA section of any XML document and therefore only their tools can accurately parse the document.
Of the XML code I have seen generated by MS applications, it's a mess, and lacks any adherence to well structured content, it's spaghetti xml. Same with the style sheets generated and the associated classes.
If this was put in the hands of the programmers who gave us .doc to .htm or those responsible for the code generation in FrontPage, what would you expect the results to be like?
There is also the huge debate (if my memory serves me right) that happened regarding the first W3C XSL recommendation where MS fought for a less strict implementation (because they saw their documents could not comply with a strict implementation).
Also, didn't Microsoft Corporation Selects SoftQuad XMetaL To Create XML Content ?
You don't seem to know HTML Tidy, one of its capabilities is cleaning Word's pseudoHTML.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
8) Release new OS with filesystem that looks like a database.
So by 2010 we will have 30 million VB "developers" who do not know what a file is.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
It most likely will not be less "open" than DOC.
However, as Office becomes more and more of a client-server^W^Wweb-services product, the file itself will become less and less accessible.
With a little setup magic, the usual shitty workflow of mailing each other DOC files could easily be be replaced by mailing each other URLs to a centralized content/licence mgmt server.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Who are you, the hall monitor?
" Microsoft is switching to XML because it will become the standard data exchange format of all things .NET (other than source code, obviously), and because it is faster and simpler to parse."
.NET platform (or whatever the fuck it is today) is incapable of exchanging binary formats. In fact it is probably more efficient to send .doc files back and forth instead of streaming them to text and back.
This makes no sense on two levels.
One is that you are presuming that the
Two is that the MS-XML that office will be using will not be interchangable with any body elses parser. If you are going to embed binary data into the XML document then you are going to have the incompatible documents.
War is necrophilia.
"You'll have to ask Microsoft why they hav a suddern desire to switch everything to XML, I have no idea."
Mmm very interesting. Either they are stupid or evil.
Do you really think they can force everybody else to stream their version of XML into office files?
War is necrophilia.
But Your Honor, it makes no difference that I was convicted of raping that other woman! This is a completely different woman! I've never been convicted of raping this particular woman! Don't you see that you should give me the benefit of the doubt?
In case anyone still doesn't understand, what I'm saying is that a company convicted of monopolizing one market should not simply be reprimanded for that one market while being allowed to monopolize another area. The judicial system is incredibly inadequate when it comes to dealing with problems like Microsoft. By the time anything gets done, it simply doesn't matter anymore and MS has found some other way to monopolize the market. Then the whole thing starts over again. We've been playing that stupid game with MS for nearly 10 years now. It's ridiculous that they continue to get away with it and have never gotten more than a slap on the wrist.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
This is a completely different woman! I've never been convicted of raping this particular woman! Don't you see that you should give me the benefit of the doubt?
I dearly hope you don't live in the US, because that's exactly how the legal system is supposed to work here.
i am sad that concise it most definitely will not be :*(.
We use Access 2002 as a front-end to our SQL Server / MySQL databases. Access 2002 is the most unstable product we have ever had from anyone, apart from maybe Windows 3.11. It regularly crashes and damages databases with dialog boxes saying "Microsoft appologises for the inconvenience. Would you like to send a bug report?". And once the mdb file gets more than about 10MB (forms and code - no data) things very really strange. Forms get corrupted and dropped. Saving changes to anything takes 5+ minutes, and often results in a crash. It really is a pile of shit. If only there were a reasonable open-source alternative that didn't require learning some obscure language like Object Pascal (for God's sake, what were they thinking).
No upgrading for us anyway. We'll put up with this and save our money for faster machines.
No. Because in XML you are allowed to define your own application of it. Hopefully I as a developer could also create my own XML application (cryptic or not) without getting in legal troubles. Otherwise I might as well start learning a trade if the computer world is really that much of a mess.
The move could also hamper data exchange with competing desktop productivity software that recognizes XML, such as Corel's WordPerfect or Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, say analysts and competitors.
Just because somebody else is first to the game doesn't mean the last guy has to follow. Microsoft has always created their own standard. They will do it again. That should be of no surprise to anybody. And MS Word won't change much as a result because it is currently proprietary and most likely will continue to be.
However I can definitely see that if Microsoft uses common XML standards that are compatible with other office suites then the underdogs might get a chance. So should we blame Microsoft if they don't do this? Microsoft is not open source, they are about the money. They have no reason to support standards and compatibility if it will hurt their bottom line. On the other hand, they might shoot themselves in the foot with such a strategy because people may not like it. Of course history hasn't taught us this lesson even though we would like to see it learned from an open source standpoint.
XML is not a language, so it is not in the same position as Java. In actual fact Microsoft has made no effort to customize XML. You will find that Microsoft XML will be passed by any standard conformant XML parser. You are not really understanding what XML is. XML defines a way of representing data in a character serialized form, what most people think of as XML - the file - and a logical structure that can be accessed through an interface, think Document Object Model (DOM), or Simple API for XML (SAX). These things work well which is why Microsoft is using them. Microsoft has to work out what information they need to put represent, and make/use and existing document type to represent their files using XML. Currently there are a number of document types.
I live in the US, and while you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, a person's past criminal record can be admitted to show that they are indeed capable of committing whatever crime they happen to be accused of, and that they have done it before. That alone is not going to get a conviction, but combined with good evidence could help to ensure a conviction, and probably an increased sentence as well. Microsoft is guilty of monopolization. We know they are quite capable and very willing to monopolize a market given any opportunity to do so. At the first sign that they may be doing so again, the DoJ should have them under a damn microscope.
Also this is not about their past criminal record on unrelated crimes; they were abusing their monopoly power in both the OS market and the Office market at the same time, and their monopoly in one area aided and abetted their monopoly in the other. These are separate crimes only by legal fiction.
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(And before anyone tells me "if you don't like it don't use it" -- I don't use it. I mean, Word is great for writing academic papers and all (I don't know any other office-type product that works well for people who write with a lot of footnotes, and no I don't have time to learn LaTeX, as cool as I might think that would be) but I would never think of using word to output HTML. But the problem is if you are getting documents from other people who only use Word, no matter what.
I tell you what, the killer app, at least for the average desktop user, would be a streamlined version of Word that only did what a word processor should do, and that automatically (and preferably seamlessly) sent other tasks to more well-designed applications for those purposes. I mean, I understand why relatively clueless people use Word for HTML, but why the hell do they try to use it for desktop publishing, for image manipulation, even for freakin' web browsing? The program shouldn't encourage such behavior by providing bad implementations of these tasks; instead it should send the task to a program that knows what it's doing.
The craziest thing about this is that MS is in a unique position to deliver exactly such an app -- they have Word already recognized as the absolute standard, they have their own desktop publisher, image manipulation tools, web design tools, and web browser. If they were willing to let go of the bloatware and open up and standardize their formats, this project would be a no-brainer. Since they won't do it, somebody else should. Apple is too committed to Word to do this (I don't think AppleWorks is taken seriously by anyone, though I could be wrong), so there really is the possibility projects like openoffice or koffice being able to deliver something like this.
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Of course, this goes (or will go) well beyond DXF since it promises to integrate all manner of Office documents.
The real challenge may be to convince authors to write structured documents. Think how few docs now use any sort of templates or employ style sheets.
"But Office's XML support will allow larger companies to extract and use data from documents more efficiently, according to Microsoft."
Larger companies with enough money to license their XML schema.
I seriously doubt it. There is just too much pressure from openoffice which is free and has a completely open XML file format. Sure some CIOs will stick with MS office but little by little that monoply will fade. It will start at the small business level because they can least afford office. As those businesses grow they will continue to use openoffice just out of momentum if nothing else. Also there will be tremendous amount of foreign countries which can not afford msoffice.
Unfortumately for MS their twin monopolies are being threatened by free competitors which are pretty damned good. Given a choice between pretty-good-and-free and better-but-expensive most rational people will will choose the former.
War is necrophilia.
Just because a file format is XML, it does not mean it's open. Even if it's "real" XML and not a wrapped binary dump (Vvjfio1@1/515...). All XML does for you is to make the *syntax* of the file format clear, not the underlying meaning. Analogously, in German, every noun begins with a capital letter, and root verb forms generally end with "-en"; this tells you a bit about the phrase "Mit grossem Bedauern haben wir vom Ableben Ihres Gatten erfahren", but it's certainly not enough to understand it.
Even an XML schema is not enough - that just tells you which elements can appear where and what they can contain. That's like knowing that a normal German sentence has the main verb in the second position in the sentence. This still doesn't tell you the meaning of the above sentence, though you can see that "haben" is the verb and "Mit grossem Bedauern" is the first part of the sentence.
For an XML language to be open, you need a full description of what each possible construct in that language means.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
"Open? Sure it's open! Just click here... and *poof* your document is open. What's that? You mean you want to open it with something other than M$ Office? Why on earth would you want to do that?"
MS is taking a small step in the right direction and all you have to say is "sue them!!!". Predictable and pathetic. Even if they don't (which is uncertain) disclose the so called "underlying XML dialect", XML is still much better and open then their old .doc (persistent storage) format, plus they would probably publish software packages for data manipulation.
So it's not totally GPL, so what?! Grow up.
The testing is sickening. But it's us or them, really.
AFAIK, Word documents keep some old, already "over-written" stuff (for Undo functionality, maybe).
;-)
I saw a story (in a dead tree mag, no link). A company sent an offer to several companies, using just one Word document as a template to finish up slightly different deals to the companies. Then a geek at one of those companies unearthed all the versions from the offer they received. Somewhat embarrassing to the sender.
I don't know whether the story is true or myth; or whether this is "possible" or "routine" out there
No no no, thats not my point. I agree with you there. My point is the ELEMENT still has to contain binary tags and attributes, but the data INSIDE the element can be binary. This might sound like a silly/pointless thing to say, but the fact is, an xml file containing nothing but base-64 binary data is STILL parsable by anyone's text viewer, just the DATA isn't (yes i know that is the important part). This is at least a little easier to read than a pure binary file, because the binary blocks have to have some ascii metadata attributed to them.
Jeremy
nice to see your backtracking when you got completely fucked over.
flushed where it belongs
mean, I understand why relatively clueless people use Word for HTML, but why the hell do they try to use it for desktop publishing, for image manipulation, even for freakin' web browsing?
:-)
Not just MS users...
*cough* emacs *cough*
OK. (So this *could* be taken as a troll, but hey - try and see if in a jovial, festive, spirit
i don't see where ms profit from closing the format here. obviously it would benefit them as well as everyone to open the "standard". i can't see how integrating excel+word etc into every-day web services produced by anyone with a .NET || J2EE || whatever server would hurt. there's plenty of stuff around now that provides a hint of what it could be like.
Years ago there were legal rumblings about the copyright/patent protection of XML formats as it pertained to other areas of the internet.
Microsoft was in the middle of this fight and if you were paying any attention then you would have realized that just because someone goes XML means nothing with respect to Open Source. Especially when you consider DMCA and the USPTO.
Any company can create any XML format and go two-faced on the deal. Yes we are Open Source. If you attempt to understand my XML format it's a violation of the DMCA and my IP rights and you will go to jail!
I am not the least surprised by this. XML has distinct advantages that many people would voluntarily choose to use. Including MicroSoft. However, XML can still be "protected".
xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 9">
<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 9">
<link rel=File-List href="./Hello%20World_files/filelist.xml">
<titl
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Author>Seth Ramsey</o:Author>
<o:LastAuthor>Seth Ramsey</o:LastAuthor>
<o:Revision>1</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>1</o:TotalTime>
<o:Created>2002-12-20T13:09:00Z</o:Created&g t;
<o:LastSaved>2002-12-20T13:10:00Z</o:LastSaved>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Company>Arlington/Roe & Co., Inc.</o:Company>
<o:Lines>1</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
<o:Version>9.4402</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
</xml><![endif]-->
<sty
<!--
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}
@page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body lang=EN-US style='tab-interval:.5in'>
<div class=Section1>
<p class=MsoNormal>Hello World.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
just caesar 9 and then swap chars on even and odd positions.
He saw some dirty arabs and fired. Too bad it was just some friendly kurds, BBC reporters and his fellow cowboys.
I never said it was impossibly bad. I have grepped out the stupid ridiculous errors. It just took far more time then it should have because the code was just so atrocious.
I often found it easier to save Word files as raw text and write the HTML around them instead of having Word do it. It saved time. That's a sad, pathetic statement.
On any Unix or Unix clone you can just run standard tools or write your own.
I would really really like to see you writing a viable substitute for MS Word. Let me explain.
Most of the people forget that the proprietory file format is not the most important of things that made Microsoft a monopoly.
Their products were simply better and more appealing to users (either visually or financially) than WordPerfect, QuattroPro and others. Even if the file format was open, it would not have changed a thing, because one would've needed to compete against MS development resources, which would be a challenging task.
The same remain true now. PDF and RTF are the open formats. So why aren't there a flourishing competition to the Acrobat and such ?
Unfortunatly with everything in a proprietary format you then end up having to build scripting languages into everything making all of your data files potential entry points for malicious code.
This is absurd. I dont know who is the mysterious 'you' in the quote, but the need for the scripting is not driven by the proprietorness of the format.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
I guess I should have known; given that he never showers, SOAP certainly wasn't invented by RMS....
If anyone makes a compatible word processor, they'll be sued. M$ in a nutshell...
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
" But this format will (of course) only represent the appearance, not any structure." WHAT!?!?! Do they still not bloody get the bloody concept, or are they deliberately trying to make interoperability unusable? They did this in earlier versions of Office with their save-as-html modes, which did stupid things like saving a "Header Type 2" as "14-point-boldface-text" or whatever your current style was rather than saving it as an HTML "H2", but at that point it could be attributed to stupidity and/or incompetence, since some people think for some reason that HTML is an appearance description language rather than an specific implementation instance of a content description metalanguage, which is a bit too abstract for some people. But XML is much more explicit about being a content description metalanguage, and if you've got enough of a clue about it to output your material as XML, you've got to get that much of the concept. I'd attribute this one to malice.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks