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Microsoft Ends Era Of Closed File Formats
RzUpAnmsCwrds writes "According to an MSDN Channel 9 interview with an Office file-format developer, the next version of Microsoft Office (Office 12) will default to newly-developed XML file formats in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The new formats will apparently include XML files along with other files (images, etc) inside of a Zip file. Microsoft will also be providing extensive documentation of the new format to the public through MSDN. The developer likewise announced that Microsoft would be releasing updates for Office 2000, XP, and 2003 to read and write the new formats when the new version of Office is released. If this interview is correct, it could mean the beginning of the end of Microsoft's proprietary file formats." Coverage at Beta News, Information Week, and the Washington Post.
You fucking troll, since when microsoft's binary document formats are documented, or fast?
Implementing a file format as binary data or even a simple SGML structure such as RTF means less overhead. Using XML you have to run an XML parser, and the file is more freeform. There are no set data structures, it is just a stream of text. With a binary format you can structure it in such a way that you can read a header in and know exactly where to seek in the file to get the information you need. With XML you are pretty much stuck reading sequentially and figuring things out as you go along. Sure, an XML parser library may make it easier, but behind the scenes it is still parsing that stream and processing each tag one at a time.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
No they won't.
Watch the video - the entire file format is completely open.
He admitted that inside the ZIP they are currently storing the binary copy to make it easier to test and profile against the formats, but when Office 12 is released it'll just be the one XML, completely open format. He also made a point that they are going to have 'thousands' of examples on MSDN, along with very detailed documentation and whitepapers.
Now whether it's patented or not, I don't know. But this is a _VERY_ big step for Microsoft. It's going to make translating between this and OASIS (which OpenOffice2 and a lot of others are considering/implementing as their default) as simple as an XSLT transformation.
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For those who don't want to watch the video, the new format will supposedly offer a %75 improvement in file size. The old, binary format did not use any compression at all. Some of the other features include having the formatting information at the end of the file so that a half transmitted file still contains all the content.
gzip and zip are completely different things. gzip compresses a stream (and does a much better job than compress, which it has replaced entirely. However, gzip is slowly being replazed by bzip2 nowadays), whereas zip is an archive format that can store individual (usually compressed) files. The huge advantage of zip over compressed tar archives comes from the fact that you have random access, i.e. can extract a single file from a potentially HUGE archive).
GIF had patent issues with the LZW-Algorithm it used. The patent has expired recently, but the GIF issue is completely unrelated to ZIP (ZIP uses LZ77).
About the patent issue: There are a dozen or so zip-related patents, but they're all highly specific and shouldn't stop anyone from using zip, or even writing a zip utility. See also Patents on data compression algorithms.
I agree with you in that binary formats can be faster, and I don't love XML-as-storage-format too much, but the case in point is *microsoft's* binary formats, which are little more than straight memory dumps, and UNDOCUMENTED, and SLOW.
A well-designed binary format makes much more sense than XML, in this I concur with you, but XML is better than current microsoft's doc formats in that it would be easier to figure out the inner workings of the format, and making struggle for compatibility a much less gory task.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
First of all, the entire MSDN library can easily be accessed online (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/), second an MSDN subscription doesn't involve any kind of NDA. The only times I've personally come across this was with pre-release stuff and with their limited beta programs and in those cases it's nothing that any other company doesn't do either.
Uhm ... try reading the license.
Looks kinda like a BSD license, don't it?
Yeah, especially the part that says "You are not licensed to sublicense or transfer your rights."
Here's two examples of prior art.
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From the FAQ:
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Why do people like you keep reiterating the tired old "without a network" line?
It hasn't been true since at least NT4 SP6a, when NT4 achieved a C2 rating *WITH* network. Windows 2000 achieved CC both with and without networking.
The NT4 link is no longer around on MS's site, but there are still some pages out there that reference it:
Such as this one
And here is Win2k
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