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RE: Future of FrameMaker: InDesign?

At 10:58 PM 7/3/00 -0500, David Cramer wrote:
>Yes, I agree. I guess one of my fears is that XML markup will be
>unusable for many format oriented products. I have often noticed a
>dismissive attitude of SGML/XML advocates toward formatting in
>general. If all printed/webbed output were to be represented
>accurately in a Venn diagram, I believe the circle for
>format-oriented material would overlap the one for
>content-object-oriented material; but some of the SGML/XML proponents
>seem to want me to believe that the content-object-oriented circle
>would contain everything. Oh well, wishful thinking motivated by a
>desire to market one's SGML/XML skills or product are understandable
>;-)
>------------------------------Snip-------------------
================================================
I know this will make most people gag, but here is an excerpt of a review 
discussing the way formatting is introduced into  XML by Word 2000, which 
is typical of how it's done by other Office 2000 components.
================================================
So let's examine the code produced by Word 2000 for a couple of simple 
examples. For these tests, I am running Beta 9.0.2216 on Windows 98. I 
wrote a one-page document with the single line "Hello World!" and saved it 
to an HTML-formatted file. When I view the source, I have a rather lengthy 
page of text. The header of the page includes all sorts of font metric 
definitions and meta tags and file information. The first few lines look 
like this:
<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml"
xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
xmlns="-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">

But the really interesting part is the body copy, which looks like this:

<body lang=EN-US style='tab-interval:.5in'>
<div class=Section1>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><b
style='mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal'><span
style='font-size:20.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;color:#3366FF'>Hello
World!<o:p/></span></b></p>

You'll notice that the font size (20 point), font color, justification 
(centered), and bold text is all preserved with this code fragment. The 
reference to the class "MsoNormal" is defined in the style section earlier 
as Times New Roman, which is the font I used in my Word document.
==========================================================
So, Microsoft simply puts all of the formatting info into element 
attributes. If this XML document were FTP'd to another site and opened in 
Word 2000 there, the result would be a replica of the original Word 
document. Of course, if you tried to open it in some other software product 
that couldn't process the attributes, you'd just get "Hello World" in the 
default format.

====================
| Nullius in Verba |
====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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