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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.
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.
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?