WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Entwined Issues [WebTech]

I have respect for both Tim Bray and Joe Wilcox. So how should I react to the comments by one about the other? Responding to Joe's article on C|Net, Tim is quoted on Scripting News saying:

This story is just silly and technically illiterate. The XML tags are already in the hands of thousands of beta developers. XML is an open and quite self-describing file format. Who needs the damn schema?

The problem here is one I've been expounding in the vigorous debate over on Sam's blog. It seems to me there are two issues being blended here, causing confusion. Tim is responding to one of them; Joe is expounding the other.

First is the XML expression of the long-time desire of the SGML community to have tools that create and respect markup within documents. Office 11 appears to be coming out with support for this capability and much of the discussion seems to be about the ability to use Office 11 to create and view arbitrary XML. It's to be welcomed, no doubt. The SGML/XML community has been promised it before and are quite rightly delighted, as long as it happens this time.

Second is the ability of the normal user to open and save their work in formats that can round-trip to other users with full integrity and function throughout the journey. As far as I can tell, Office 11 makes no concessions in this direction as it neither supports the formats others use nor documents the formats it uses itself - see Sean's comments. This is the area the OASIS office formats TC is trying to address.

Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft says:

Office 11 supports LegalXML, OPML, RSS, DocBook, XBRL, etc

but the problem is, as JDD points out, there's no other word processor used by ordinary folk (the ones who pay for all the Office licenses in existence and hence pay for Microsoft to stay in business) that either has its format supported or is likely to be able to read and write the default format in which Office will store its files (which as I understand it is still a proprietary binary format). Or am I wrong? Will the new Word save files by default as XML? Will the format used be available with no strings attached so others can support it? Will it be contributed to the OASIS TC? Watch this space...

Meanwhile I'm with Sam Ruby:

I still think there are two sides to this story. On one side, the ability of MS tools to adapt to formats that users can describe will be an incredible step forward. On the other hand, this doesn't explain an unwillingness to working with others to describe the semantics that PowerPoint 11 uses to capture a pie chart.

It seems that the great new features being introduced for power users and web services integration (my first area above) are being used as an excuse not to join the OASIS TC and not to provide interoperable productivity apps for the average user (my second area above).

posted at 6:07 PM (UK) | |