Office 2003 and XML

zachlipton writes "Internet World is reporting that initial reports from Office 2003 beta testers don't look good for those hoping to share documents with non-MS systems using the XML file format. Gary Edwards, the OpenOffice.org representative for the OASIS XML file-format group is quoted as saying "although it's still early in the review process, it does look as though XP XML has been so seriously crippled as to be useless to anyone but the big content management and collaboration system providers." Apparently, all formatting and presentation information is removed from the XML. Furthermore, Office's new collaboration featres will only work with users who are also running Office 2003 (requiring Windows 2000 or 2003) that are connecting over XP servers." So Microsoft will continue its efforts to lock-in users with proprietary formats, and hopefully the rest of the world will produce an XML standard document format without them.

Comments

Please God

[DonFinch]

let someone at the DOJ read this and FUCKING DO SOMETHING.

Re:Separating Content from Presentation a Good Thi

[DaveAtFraud]

Bzzzzztttt!!! Wrong answer.

A well-formed SGML or XML document should have absolutely NO formatting information contained within the content. This allows the document to be completely portable since most formatting is dependent on the output media/device. Keeping the formatting out of the content means the output can be made to look correct regardless of whether the document is printed, displayed directly, converted to say PDF, displayed on a high res monitor or output on somebody's text capable cell phone by simply providing the appropriate style sheet. As soon as you put formatting into the content, you restrict the output to devices and media that support that formatting. Not a great example but even in HTML, the document is more portable if you use an <EM> tag instead of say a <B> tag since the output device can interpret emphasis a number of different ways but bold means bold.

At one point in my career, I was writing software to tag documents (SGML) that were originally intended to only be printed. We went through HELL developing code to recognize the myriad different ways the original authors had put in formatting as content and then trying to figure out what the formatting meant with regard to the document structure.

oh poor little *nix users

[x0n]

I'm not trying to bait here, but hello? So everyone's whining (again) because you can't just open up a Word Document directly in OpenOffice / StarOffice / WhateverOffice? You've got better than that -- you've got the DATA, e.g. the English text, and you apply your own styles (xslt etc). This is what XML data exchange is all about no? Presentation is just syntactic sugar, no? Separate your data from presentation.

- Oisin

Re:At some point.....

[prisoner-of-enigma]

For those not running Windows, the Word viewer comes "free" with a $199.- (list price) version of Windows

Which, I'll point out, is the highest possible price you could pay. Even a token amount of effort would reveal that you can get WinXP Pro for under $100, and WinXP Home for under $75. Just check Pricewatch. No, these are not educational licenses, they are real licenses.

a good sized chunk of your system disk (not that it really matters much given today's HD prices and capacities)

Good. You got that one right. With 80GB disks being common, who cares if the OS uses 1GB to install. Of course, you can make a WinXP installation fit into something much smaller if you'd like.

and the usual installation hassles, like drivers for equipment which isn't included on the CD etc

You're completely bypassing the fact that you have to do the exact same damned thing with Linux if the drivers aren't on the CD. Further, if the drivers aren't in some handy, pre-compiled form, you've got to compile them, or compile a new kernel with the drivers in them, or a new module. You have to worry about dependency hell, which makes DLL hell look like paradise in comparison. That's a far greater "hassle" for most folks than getting a Windows driver...which, by the way, about 100% of products sold today come with Windows drivers on a CD or floppy. How many come with Linux drivers out of the box? Precious few (although it is growing).

Even if you got Windows "free" with your PC from the manufacturer, you just paid the Microsoft tax up front

First off, the "Microsoft Tax" is propaganda at its worst. You paid a licensing fee for software, the same as if you paid for any other bundled software with any PC, whether it's "free" or not. At the end of the day, OEM's pay roughly $20-$30 per PC for these licenses, which is a damn tiny cost for a modern OS. Sure, you can download RedHat for free...what about support? That costs extra unless you're willing to wade through newsgroups that can be rude, uninformative, and daunting to new users. Then there's the poor documentation that ships with most open source software -- it's either out of date, not yet finished, poorly organized, or not applicable to your situation. Most people, yourself included obviously, grossly underestimate the total cost of a system, support being the thing that most folks leave out. Linux folks think "hey, if I can do it, so can everybody else", forgetting that "the rest of the world" has something better to do with their time than wade through documentation that was written by a programmer, for a programmer. "End users? Who's that?", say most programmers. "They should get a clue and learn Java/C++/Perl/PHP and then they can do this." Yeah...right.

and will continue to pay if you want to keep your system up to date.

Really? I don't know about you, but the entire rest of the world gets Windows Update and Office Update for free. I'm not sure why you're paying for such things, but I would suspect that you're simply making this up to further your argument. Sorry, it doesn't wash. Updates are free.

If you're talking about upgrades, that's different, and upgrades should cost you something if useful features are added. It's up to the user to decide if the new functions warrant additional costs, but MS isn't holding a gun to anyone's head forcing them to upgrade. I can run Office 97 for as long as I like, even after offical support of it is dropped, so long as it does what I like. Sure, MS would like you to upgrade, but you don't have to. Millions of Windows 95/Office95 users worldwide haven't upgraded, which is testimony enough.

That's like saying the Grappa I got offered after shelling out $150.- for dinner with a date last Saturday was "free". Sure, I didn't pay for it, but you can't get it without buying dinner first.

Yes, I know there are solutions for reading MS Office documents on Li