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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?
"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.
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.
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
"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!*
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
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."
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
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"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..."
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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"
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.Oh no! Heaven forbid someone extend the eXtensible Markup Language!
IE does a pretty decent job of parsing xml already actually. Its perfectly strict. 6 Does make some errors though that Moz gets right.
Jeremy
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Well, I guess that's one less now!
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.
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
"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.
aahhhrrg! Every one says this "OpenOffice can't handle complex formatting of word docs"
What complex formating? I've been using OO instead of Word for a long time now. I've converted tables, footnotes, tabstops, embedded images, bulleted lists, graphs and combinations of it all in the same document. I've never had a problem with formatting. More often I have problems with Word 97 or RTF documents opening in Office XP. Screws it up everytime. So please tell me what OO can't do I'm dying to know.
The Anti-Blog
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.
The difference between Microsoft and their competitors is that MS is willing to take a long-term view:
:-(
1) Establish a monopoly on office productivity software
2) Profit!
3) See income drop once everyone has Office. Market saturation!
4) Less Profit
5) Release new Office with new file formats; use monopoly to get it pre-loaded on all new PCs.
6) Eventually everyone else upgrades Office in order to read new file formats they're getting from their co-workers.
7) Profit!
8) Release new OS with filesystem that looks like a database.
9) Release YAO (Yet Another Office) [see 5 & 6] that only works with new database/filesystem in new OS.
10) Now, not only do the masses have to upgrade Office to read co-workers files, they have to upgrade Windows as well.
11) Profit!!!!!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
This may all be true, but Microsoft never achieved the technological prowess and glory (IMHO) that Sun Microsystems enjoys with their achievement of making the computer the network.
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.
Does everyone remember how Office 10 was promoted as the BIG XML release? And now Hailstorm has disappeared too.
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.
Even with grep replace tools, cleaning up this crap takes hours.
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!!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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!
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
Oooops! Missed the the boat by a little bit there, eh Richard?
Uh oh... *double* oops.
" 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 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
This is an ex-parrot!
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.
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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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?"
The testing is sickening. But it's us or them, really.
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
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
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.
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.
Agreed about your point, but I want to point out a reason I consider to be partial explanation for the fact.
Templates and stylesheets in MS Office are difficult to use, do not work at all for complex stuff, and break from one version to another.
When I used MS Word for DOS and OS/2, from versions 3 to 5.5, we had stylesheets and templates as separate things. Templates were just documents set aside as documents. Stylesheets were separate files that contained only the style definitions and formatting. You could easily apply different stylesheets to any document, thus getting the desired output.
When MS Word for Windows, in its version 6 if memory does not fail me, merged templates and stylesheets, chaos ensued. I could not convert my old documents properly. I failed to reproduce the efficiency of the old work flow. I had been educating fellow users on the benefits of structuring and separating formatting onto stylesheets much before I heard of LaTe or SGML, but now even myself could not make it work. Even when I could structure complex documents, they would break in other systems. Never again I could separate content and formatting, and apply different stylesheets to the same document.
I have heard about Microsoft systems that they are a matter of luck. That some people (whom I never met) have bulletproof systems (I doubt) and some others have just bad luck. Even if it was true, which I doubt, it would still be a comment on the sad state of things that so much depends on sheer luck. As it is, the better explanation I find about these so different perceptions is that some people had knew Unix, DOS and mainframe systems (like I did), and so they find MS-W32 to be worthless; much more people have been reared on DOS and MS-W16, and so find MS-W32 to be the greatest thing on Earth.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
" 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