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?"

Comments

InfoWorld articles

[andynms]

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."

Re:InfoWorld articles

[frisket]

I was at the launch presentation of Office-11 by Jean Paoli at XML 2003 in Baltimore MD last week, and I'm also a late sign to MS's extended beta list for the product (now closed).

To clear up some points people have commented on (based on a very preliminary inspection plus a lot of discussion at the conference):

1. The default save format is still .doc (ie you have to go the extra click to save in XML format)
2. If you pick to click it, the default XML format is MS's own office-document vocabulary, which retains all the formatting, held in attributes. Hairy but processable, and they will be shipping their schema for it so people can reprocess it externally. But this format will (of course) only represent the appearance, not any structure.
3. It will also let you specify your own schema (or an industry standard one) and let you supply a binding of named styles to your element types, so you can edit using what look like styles but actually get represented in the saved file as XML markup. There is some debate as to whether this constitutes "being an XML editor" or just "being a wordprocessor that saves data in XML" (my money is on the latter).
4. It will not support DTDs, so you're stuck with W3C Schemas whether you like them or not*
5. The discussion over a [more?] suitable schema/DTD for handling office documents (wordprocessing, spreadsheet, presentation) continues at the OASIS TC on Open Office XML Formats **

With Office-11, Microsoft has nearly caught up with Corel's WordPerfect, (which has had a fully-fledged SGML and XML editor built-in for years) and XMetaL (which Corel took over from SoftQuad earlier this year). MS still has a long way to go to match industrial-strength applications like ArborText's EPIC or even Emacs with psgml-mode et al , but Office-11 will be a solution for the masses who believe the Word interface to be more desirable, or the Microsoft licensing régime to be more attractive, or the software to be more stable.

* [Bias note] I think W3C schemas were a big mistake; provision for data content typing and validation, namespaces, and extended grouping could have been achieved by extending DTD syntax; and wimpy programmers who moan about having two syntaxes to handle should get a life - it's not a big deal, the code is free and has been in use for 15 years :-)

** Sun has donated the OpenOffice (aka StarOffice) XML file formats to the public domain. It's worth remembering that {Star|Open}Office has been saving in XML as its native format for some time now, and has a lot more experience at this than MS.

Even grep replacing doesn't help

[burgburgburg]

Word HTML output was always atrocious. It failed everywhere from correct tag order (as is shown above), not properly quote parameters (sometimes it uses ", sometimes it uses ', sometimes nothing). Multiple tags, all with different styles one after another (actual example below)

<b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
style='f ont-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;font-fam ily:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:
"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:black;
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-f areast-language:EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA'><br
clear=all style='page-break-before:right;mso-break-type:sect ion-break'>
</span></i></b>

Even with grep replace tools, cleaning up this crap takes hours.

Re:Defaults

[dillon_rinker]

Yup. Government standards are why you can buy screws and nuts from different manufacturers and have them work together. They are why you can buy "orange juice" at the grocery store and know that it's not "juice" wrung out of a pile of autumn leaves (hey, it's juice, it's orange, what more do you want?). Government standards are why you can fill fly in an airplane and know it won't crash.

Sure, all these needs could be fulfilled by voluntary industry standards, if it weren't for those pesky human beings, fallible and greedy creatures that they are.

It's XML, get over it.

[Ankh]

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