xml-dev - Save-To-XML

[Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>]

"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> 
> Ah, but if MS Word had a simple "Save-To-XML" option that let users save
> their documents using markup based on the styles they've built.  

I was thinking about this last week. Someone could build this relatively
easily on top of the Office 2000 save as XML and the MSHTML DLL. 

> Three
> times now, I've seen organizations that had done a lot of very good
> informal work with Word styles, and no easy path for those structures or
> the documents that use them to move to XML.  I guess the incentive just
> isn't there for MS to make life easy.  There are tools to do it, but it's
> still not much fun.  (Another painful case of asymmetry.)

Even if the tool to do it was a "Save-To-XML" option it would still be not
much fun. 

After all, the goal is not to get it into any-old-XML (that's easy) but to
get it into "our vocabulary". That's the harder part. There are tricky
problems about setting up division structure, converting tables to a
particular table model, cross-references to a particular linking model and
so forth. In the end it is a transformation job no matter how you slice
it. And even then you will likely have to do many manual fix-ups unless
the writers are Zen monks.

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

"Perpetually obsolescing and thus losing all data and programs every 10
years (the current pattern) is no way to run an information economy or
a civilization." - Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog
http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/10124.html

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