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

"XML dialect"?!?

[TrevorB]

"XML dialect"?

It's called a schema.

Talk about embrace and extend. Sounds like this will be more "XML-like" than real XML... :)

well, of course

[Planesdragon]

Could this be grounds for another anti-trust suit against Microsoft?

Of course it could. But so could any bit of news about MS on /. in the past twenty years, from EULA alterations to Palladium.

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.

Re:LOL

[commodoresloat]

Or anything close to "standard." The best we can hope for is code that is recognized as valid, and I wouldn't hold my breath for that either. I've seen HTML like the following come out of Word:

<B><A HREF="http://whatever.org"> Link </B></A>.

I'm not kidding, either. Seems like an easy thing to avoid in an HTML generator. Validator routinely reports hundreds of coding errors in simple short documents generated by Word. Ugh. What really sucks is when you're working on a web page for someone and cleaning out all the crap that Word generates, then at the last minute they send you the same document with some minor errors corrected.... and all the same major errors generated by Word. Fun.

This is very simple

[mao che minh]

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.

Re:Reverse Engineer

[Anonymous Coward]

No, of course MS wouldn't put the data in weird binary or encrypted format in their XML output formats ... like they did with Visio 2002's XML output (http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF- 8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=OiH2rn9nCHA.1808%40TK2MSFTNGP10 &rnum=3&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dxml%2Bvisio%2Bmime%26hl %3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26scoring% 3Dd) where they put all the really important stuff needed for interoperability in ForeignData elements.

HINT: if you see MS use the phrase "full fidelity" when they talk about their new Office's XML output then you can be sure they're not giving you the data interoperability/portability you thought XML output was going to give you.

Open but Secure

[mugnyte]

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.

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 .NET server at MS hosting? Nah, this cripples offline Office. Keyless hash?
Curious Curious.

mug

Don't get confused.

[twitter]

You are goddamned fucking lucky that the government tells you what the default values for things should be. That's what the government is there for, mostly; to tell you that the default value for a building is to have a fire exit and that it may not be locked.

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.

Re:EXCEL SAMPLE

[zeugma-amp]

This displays really well as source in Phoenix .5. There is a blurb at the top that says "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below." ... Then it displays it as prettily formatted (though fairly useless) code.

I'd like to see a clean HTML version of the same. It might make it somewhat easier to understand more or less what it is doing

Re:Are you paying attention? It's Microsoft.

[Axe]

..so I can write a cross-platform tool to open their files.

ifstream("MyOfficeFile.doc", ios::in);

Crossplatform enough for you?

Oh, you mean edit the files? I remember writing VBA code that did that just fine.. Good documentation how to do that - much easier then working with a crazy-ass XML schema?

So what exactly are you asking for?