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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.
Yeah, but...
It's unclear from the article whether that leaves the style information intact, and obviously Gary Edwards has an ax to grind, but in the systems I implement, sometimes I can't get users to adopt the use of style sheets, but I can extract the semantic information from stylistic patterns. It's not all that difficult to look at the formatting for a screenplay, for example, and pull out the meta information about what actors appear in what scenes based on the bold outdented bits.
If I can get to the presentation markup as well, if the style sheets are in an easy to use format, then this is no problem. If the XML is a simple export format rather than the full document then I may as well be printing to PostScript and trying to reverse engineer the semantics from that.
All Microsoft needs to do is make their standard an open one (that can be used by others), like Adobe has done with their PostScript and PDF formats. Adobe has done quite well with their products based on these formats, too. Products like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (which works very well w/ bitmaps saved in PostScript) are the industry standard in digital art. If Microsoft followed a similar model, I'm sure that Microsoft Word will continue to be the industry standard in word processing software, and Microsoft as a business won't be any less richer for it.
1) Take MS, make a report that says they did something bad, watch how many people flock to bash them DESPITE THE FACTS PRESENTED IN THE ARTICLE, which leads me to:
2) How many people read the article? And of those people who DID, :
3) How many of them know that XML is supposed to be a divorce of data from presentation? Why this comes as a shock to people is obvious - they didn't know that.
The poster above who said "style sheets" - bravo. You couldn't have made a better point with two words.
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
The problem is that they don't include it elsewhere.. So in order to share documents in the style intended by the user, it must be saved as the proprietary format.
IMHO, this ensures the user will opt-out of the XML format, and stay with the proprietary format. As I posted above, if Microsoft are going to do this, then they should bundle an XSL document with each XML document.
Why? The attitude sounds harsh when expressed so simply, but if you tell you "client" that you can't read the file and that your company has decided not to purchase the software required to be able to do so as otherwise they would have to pass on the associated costs to their clients, so could they please send the file in a format you can read instead (even Word XP or earlier thanks to oo.o) or fax it, should the client really have a problem and if so is it worth keeping hte client (yes I really said that, lots of the time troublesome clients aren't worth keeping without changes if you actually can cost them completely)? Similarly with a coworker you can ask them if you can buy the software from their budget (in a company setting there should be company standards so this should be easy)!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
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...
That's because XML is not a file format, it is instead a format for file formats. To quote the O'Reilly "Learning XML" book, page 2:
Note that despite its name, XML is not itself a markup language: it's a set of rules for building markup languages.
I've said this many times on /. (look at my history), but the fact that a particular format is XML-based says nothing of your ability to read it. I'm even going beyond the fact that Microsoft could simply stick their traditional file formats into a CDATA and claim XML compliancy.
The statement "If Microsoft used a standard XML format for their documents then anyone could read them" makes as much sense as an equally stupid statement like "If Microsoft just used 8-bit bytes in their file formats then anyone could read them".
Sorry to rant, but the level of cluelessness around XML is astounding. Please read up, there's a ton of useful information on XML around the internet.
MDC
Do you have ESP?
You could also just download the free MS Word viewer that Microsoft provides here.
> You could also just download the free MS Word viewer that Microsoft provides here [microsoft.com]
For those not running Windows, the Word viewer comes "free" with a $199.- (list price) version of Windows, a good sized chunk of your system disk (not that it really matters much given today's HD prices and capacities) and the usual installation hassles, like drivers for equipment which isn't included on the CD etc. Even if you got Windows "free" with your PC from the manufacturer, you just paid the Microsoft tax up front, and will continue to pay if you want to keep your system up to date.
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 Linux. But I always cringe when people tell me to use the "free" readers - they're not free in any sense of the word in my book.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Excuse me if I don't take this article seriously, but the author apparently knows nothing about Windows. Office 2003 will only work on Windows 2000 or 2003? Not Windows XP? Maybe he meant that the collaboration servers require Windows 2000 servers or Windows Server 2003 servers, since there is no XP Server. And speaking of XP, what exactly does he mean by "connecting over XP servers"? That's simply impossible -- there is no server version of XP, only Home and Pro.
As for Microsoft not supporting Office on the obsolete Win9x platforms, good for them. It's past time for Win9x to be killed off once and for all. Not supporting it in Office is a good step forward.