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XML Support In Office 2003 Isn't For Everyone
0x0d0a writes "Unfortunately, it seems that Microsoft's recent campaign to promote Office 2003 based on its XML support may be a bit misleading. Only the Enterprise and Professional releases will have this support -- not Standard. Microsoft will still be leveraging file format compatibility for at least another Office release."
but XML support in OpenOffice is.
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This is guarenteed to not be the first post.
I m not counting on MS Office Suite to provide me with a XML editor. Here are some alternatives:
DocSoft's W2XML Version 2
Authentic by Altova
i4i Tagless Editor
XMLWriter by Wattle Software
Opensource Extensible XML Modeling Application
If you know of any other GUI based XML modeling/editing apps, please feel free to add them to this list.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
This is as good-a-time as any to migrate away from Microsoft Office. Open Office 1.1 is about to come out and it looks brilliant!! (the beta is currently available at http://www.openoffice.org/ ) It supports open standards (eg. XML), Microsoft Documents (word/excel/powerpoint) and exports to PDF (both text and graphics) at the press of a button! It also manages to count page numbers correctly when printing (* cough - word, cough *).
:)
On the other hand, my wife prefers Word and I prefer Open Office. The only time she likes open office is when she asks me to convert a document from one word format to another - because word won't do it at all, or word converts it very badly.
Also, I save several hundred dollars every few years
AC
It's great to see someone else gets it. Postscript is actually a language which describes layout -- really, nothing is stopping you from doing all your work in it. Same with TeX. Of course, both languages (and they are true languages) are extremely complex and generally benefit from a middle-ground tool to do the real work (LyX, TeXinfo, Acrobat, Dia (?) etc).
:)
Treat XML like a database. It has rules of operation, but what you contain and how you describe the data are completely arbitrary.
That said, if office is really aiming for interoperability, they would publish the XML schema and layout rules. However, as most of us already know, it's just yet another business with the desire to put "XML" on their "Corporate Resume" to make them look more "open".
Sorry for all the double-quoted words.
XML is a text-based system for data storage and retrieval, intended to be *self documenting*. In other words, the details on what fonts are used, what settings The User has set for individual parts of the documents, the parameters for those setting, etc. ARE ALL SUPPOSED TO BE STORED IN READABLE FORMAT WITHIN XML TAGS, CONFORMING TO A KNOWN, PUBLISHED DOCUMENT DESCRIBING THE CONTENT.
No it's not. XML is not supposed to store information such as 'font' and other presentational features. This is the job of the XSL stylesheets or CSS etc. XML is designed to store data in a structured way. So for instance you may have a <chapter> tag, but what font to use for chapter tags is only supposed to be specified in the XSLT. If I did an XML export of my word document, I would expect (hope for) an XML document, and either an XSLT stylesheet transforming the XML to HTML, or an XSL:FO stylesheet so that I can turn the XML into a pdf or postscript file. However, the stylesheets would be the 'icing on the cake'. The essential item is the XML formatted data, not the presentational information.