"Microsoft stinking Word"

[m.oritz_b.erger@xxxxxxxxxxx (Moritz Berger)]

First, I want to apologize for the tone of some of my previous remarks. I'm
sure that Dan deserves to be treated with more respect. Frankly, I was
simply annoyed and shouldn't have displayed my anger so visibly. Sorry.

Below are some comments and examples about WordML (XML export from Word11
that preserves all document properties) from some of the most respected
authorities I can think of. Should make an interesting reading for you,
please check them out (hyperlinks provided).

M.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: DW Emory [mailto:danemory@globalcrossing.net]
> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2003 10:53 PM
> To: Moritz Berger; framers@omsys.com
> Cc: FrameSGML List
> Subject: RE: Office 2003 Beta

> 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?

Why don't you ask the people who wrote the standard?
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/02/21/08plofficexml_1.html
quote: "Microsoft's Jean Paoli, the architect of Office 11's XML support,
was co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification with Tim Bray. The first thing
Paoli showed Bray was that any existing .doc  file can be saved as XML -
specifically, as WordML, which expresses both the style and the content of
the document in pure XML. "When I showed that to Tim," Paoli remarked, "he
was jumping for joy." In a separate interview, Bray - an Internet search
pioneer and founder of data-visualization provider Antarctica Systems - said
the same thing."

This is what WordML looks like:
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200303/msg00615.html

Tim Bray says about this:
http://xml.coverpages.org/Bray-Office11.html

quote: " When you get something like a Word table or floating text box the
markup gets really severely dense and ugly, but I didn't see anything that
seemed egregiously wrong, it's not pretending to do anything more than
capture all the semantics that Word carries around inside, which are
correspondingly severely dense and ugly. And HTML tables get pretty hideous
too.

Why did I like this? I didn't see anything that I couldn't pick apart
straightforwardly with Perl, and if someone asked me to write a script to
pull all the paragraphs out of a Word doc that contain the word "foo" in
bold, well you could do that. Which seems pretty important to me.

The idea is that you can have a Word document with all that formatting and
then you can mix that up pretty freely with your own schema stuff, and have
validation, then you can save it as Word (your markup plus Word's) or as
pure XML (discards Word's markup, leaving just yours). The old Corel
WPerfect SGML editor used to be able to do this too.

WordML and VML (for graphics) and your own schemas all get namespaces and
they seem to use them sensibly."


Also worth watching: http://www.microsoft.com/usa/webcasts/upcoming/1752.asp



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