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Is the New Microsoft Office Really Open?

Posted by Cliff on from the a-window-undecided dept.

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?"

3 of 485 comments (clear)

  1. well, of course by Planesdragon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:LOL by commodoresloat · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  3. Open but Secure by mugnyte · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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