Gates Embraces Web Service Interoperability

djh101010 writes "In a CNN article which looks more like something out of The Onion, Bill Gates expresses his interest in participating in interoperability with rival technologies, through common standards. Specifically mentioned are IBM's WebSphere, and Linux. 'We're being as inclusive as we can,' Gates said of Microsoft's role in the cross-platform project. 'This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there.'

Comments

Re:XML

[molarmass192]

The namespace schemas are proprietary and redistribution is not permitted. No namespace schema, no way to make sense of what's in the XML.

Exactly

[Carnage4Life]

We all know how Gates "embraced" XML for Office 11...

You mean how Microsoft shipped XML vocabularies compliant to the W3C XML 1.0 recommendation with schemas for the XML formats used by Word and Excel, stylesheets to convert WordML to HTML, and Office products like InfoPath that use over a dozen XML and Web standards in a compliant manner. Yeah, it is really cool how Microsoft embraced the XML family of technologies.

Disclaimer: I work on the XML team at Microsoft but not directly with Microsoft Office.

Re:Exactly

[DickBreath]

There is no XML "standard" for Office documents.

KDE recently announced that KOffice would embrace the document formats of OpenOffice.org.

This means that a Windows user running OpenOffice.org could save a document, send it to a KOffice user on Linux, and expect it to open.

There is an effort to make a standard XML based office document format. Two office suites, so far, embrace it.

Article in InfoWorld

OASIS charter

XML for the masses

Re:Here is a sample of Word 2003 XML

[SteveX]

OpenOffice actually outputs four different XML files in a zip file when you save a document.. here's what they look like for comparison (for a default document with just the word Hello in it):

content.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE office:document-content PUBLIC "-//OpenOffice.org//DTD OfficeDocument 1.0//EN" "office.dtd"><office:document-content xmlns:office="http://openoffice.org/2000/office" xmlns:style="http://openoffice.org/2000/style" xmlns:text="http://openoffice.org/2000/text" xmlns:table="http://openoffice.org/2000/table" xmlns:draw="http://openoffice.org/2000/drawing" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:number="http://openoffice.org/2000/datastyle " xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:chart="http://openoffice.org/2000/chart" xmlns:dr3d="http://openoffice.org/2000/dr3d" xmlns:math="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:form="http://openoffice.org/2000/form" xmlns:script="http://openoffice.org/2000/script" office:class="text" office:version="1.0"><office:script/><office:font- decls><style:font-decl style:name="Tahoma1" fo:font-family="Tahoma"/><style:font-decl style:name="Arial Unicode MS" fo:font-family="&apos;Arial Unicode MS&apos;" style:font-pitch="variable"/><style:font-dec l style:name="Tahoma" fo:font-family="Tahoma" style:font-pitch="variable"/><style:font-dec l style:name="Times New Roman" fo:font-family="&apos;Times New Roman&apos;" style:font-family-generic="roman" style:font-pitch="variable"/></office:font-decls>< office:automatic-styles/><office:body><text:sequen ce-decls><text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Illustration"/><text:sequence-dec l text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Table"/><text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Text"/><text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Drawing"/></text:sequence-decls><text:p text:style-name="Standard">Hello.</text:p></office :body></office:document-content>

meta.xml:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE office:document-meta PUBLIC "-//OpenOffice.org//DTD OfficeDocument 1.0//EN" "office.dtd"><office:document-meta xmlns:office="http://openoffice.org/2000/office" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:meta="http://openoffice.org/2000/meta" office:version="1.0"><office:meta><meta:generator> OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 (Win32)</meta:generator><!--645m18(Build:8687)-->< meta:creation-date>2003-09-18T11:55:07</meta:creat ion-date><dc:date>2003-09-18T11:56:33</dc:date><dc :language>en-US</dc:language><meta:editing-cycles> 3</meta:editing-cycles><meta:editing-duration>PT18 S</meta:editing-duration><meta:user-defin ed meta:name="Info 1"/><meta:user-defined meta:name="Info 2"/><meta:user-defined meta:name="Info 3"/><meta:user-defined meta:name="Info 4"/><meta:document-statistic meta:table-count="0" meta:image-count="0" meta:object-count="0" meta:page-count="1" meta:paragraph-count="1" meta:word-count="1" meta:character-count="6"/></office:meta></office:d ocument-meta>

settings.xml I can't include because it has a UUEncoded section that Slashdot refuses..

styles.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE office:document-styles PUBLIC "-//OpenOffice.org//DTD OfficeDocument 1.0//EN" "office.dtd"><office:document-styles xmlns:office="http://openoffice.org/2000/office" xmlns:style="http://openoffi

Re:Here is a sample of Word 2003 XML

[DickBreath]

How much effort is it to zip Word's XML output up?

If XML is your primary document format, as it is for OOo, then it is important to use Zip. There is another important motivation for OOo to use Zip. Because Zip is a container format, not just a compression format. Multiple XML files. plus bitmaps, and other objects are included within an OOo document.

Suppose you have a Word doc with lots of bitmaps. If you save this as XML, then those objects must either be (1) Omitted, or (2) converted into a textual form and put into the XML. Contrast with the efficiency of OOo's format. A bitmap or OLE object would just be added to the zip file in its native form. Plus the OOo zip file can contain multiple XML files, such as the Content.xml and a separate style sheet xml, for instance.

To get to a single item within a Word XML, I would have to parse all of the XML, skipping large blocks of textual binary data. But in OOo's zip file, I have direct lookup access to obtain, say, a bitmap object that I need right now.

Zip is not used so much for compression as it is as a container. In fact, the OOo zip file could hypothetically not use any compression, yet be fully forward and backward compatible with all implementations of OOo, or even KOffice. Saving a document uncompressed results in faster performance, but it is still a zip of numerous files, including xml files.

So a future OOo could do a "quick save" in a fully compliant way, but with no compression on some/all of the zip items.


Also, don't forget that most people if saving as XML won't want to send around a zip file in email as their primary use of such a file format. They're more likely to do something else with the XML data instead. Which means that with OO, you have to unzip it to use it.

Again, in OOo, the zipped-xml is the primary document format. The fact that standard tools can process it (zip and xml) is just a bonus. OOo doesn't need a separate format (like Word's XML format) to turn documents into a "readable" form.

OOo's native doc format is already very readable and accessible. Just take a Writer doc (.sxw) rename it to (.zip), unzip it, and you've got a folder of xml files and possibly other files.