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

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.