Microsoft Word Document ML Schemas Published

Lars Munch writes "On Monday the 17th November the xml schemas for the Word Document ML along with documentation, was uploaded to the Infostructurebase (ISB). With the Word Document ML specification anybody can generate, view and process Microsoft word documents on any format." (Here are the legal terms under which the schemas can be used.) "The Word Document ML is based on the W3C specification eXtensible Markup Language (XML), there by providing documents that are easy to integrate into a large variety of systems. The Danish Government Infostructurebase is the first schema repository to make the schemas accessible to the public. The Microsoft Office Document ML schemas and documentation can now be downloaded from the ISB Repository." There are more links on this page.

Comments

Valid, non-proprietary XML?

[PCM2]

I just launched a copy of Microsoft Word 2003, opened a copy of one of my documents, selected "Save As..." and chose "XML Document." I then tried to open the resulting *.XML file in TextPad, which gave me the following error:

WARNING: "r1-Vendor_Evaluations.xml" contains characters that do not exist in code page 1252 (ANSI - Latin I). They will be converted to the system default character, if you click OK.

Am I misinterpreting something, or is not the whole point of XML that it is both human- and machine-readable? This doesn't even seem to be properly machine-readable.

Re:Out-Open-Sourcing Open Source

[TomV]

The License for implementing the specs requires that you attach their license to all files and derivative works.

Didn't a Mr Stallman write a license with a similar requirement some years back?