RE: Office 2003 Beta

[DW Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:55 PM 3/22/03 +0100, Moritz Berger wrote:

>Internet News was reporting based on hearsay:
>Quote: " As for the file formats, he called Office 2003's XML "crippled,"
>because it strips XML files of all presentation and formatting information
>when saving them in the XML file format."
>
>In reality, you can do both:
>1. Save the document as a plain XML document in a selected customer-defined
>schema, without any Word-specific markup.
>2. Save the document as a rich Word XML document including all the
>information that is saved in the .doc format (such as custom property
>metadata and so on).

But there's the rub, isn't it? If you need to deliver formatting and custom 
property metadata information to non-Word applications, you're out of luck, 
whereas
Oasis's Open Office XML Format goals are as follows (note items 4 and 5 in 
particular):

The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format 
specification for office applications.
The resulting file format must meet the following requirements:
1. it must be suitable for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, 
charts, and graphical documents,
2. it must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) v1.0 
and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications,
3. it must retain high-level information suitable for editing the document,
4. it must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based 
languages or tools,
5. it should keep the document's content and layout information separate 
such that they can be processed independently of each other, and
6. it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever possible 
and permitted.

So, what it comes down to is this:

If you want to have it all and you accept the Microsoft approach, you're 
stuck with Microsoft stinking Word and specific types of Windoze platforms. 
If that isn't an overt attempt to preempt/hijack an emerging universal 
standard, what is it?
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
DW Emory <danemory@globalcrossing.net>


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