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   RE: XML in .NET - more than just SOAP?

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  • From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
  • To: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>,'Michael Champion' <Mike.Champion@softwareag-usa.com>, xml-dev@lists.xml.org
  • Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 10:58:41 +0200

Joshua,

interesting documentation and statement.

Fact is, it's not true (or I am doing something wrong).

Create a new Word document, type "foo" and save as web page. You get
something like:

--

<html xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">

<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 9">
<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 9">
<link rel=File-List href="./foo-Dateien/filelist.xml">
<title>foo</title>
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
 <o:DocumentProperties>
  <o:Author>Julian Reschke</o:Author>
  <o:LastAuthor>Julian Reschke</o:LastAuthor>
  <o:Revision>1</o:Revision>
  <o:Created>2000-07-26T08:53:00Z</o:Created>
  <o:LastSaved>2000-07-26T08:53:00Z</o:LastSaved>
  <o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
  <o:Lines>1</o:Lines>
  <o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
  <o:Version>9.2812</o:Version>
 </o:DocumentProperties>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
 <w:WordDocument>
  <w:HyphenationZone>21</w:HyphenationZone>
 </w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]-->
<style>
<!--
 /* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
	{mso-style-parent:"";
	margin:0cm;
	margin-bottom:.0001pt;
	mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
	font-size:12.0pt;
	font-family:"Times New Roman";
	mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
	mso-ansi-language:EN-US;}
@page Section1
	{size:595.3pt 841.9pt;
	margin:70.85pt 70.85pt 2.0cm 70.85pt;
	mso-header-margin:35.4pt;
	mso-footer-margin:35.4pt;
	mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1
	{page:Section1;}
-->
</style>
</head>

<body lang=DE style='tab-interval:35.4pt'>

<div class=Section1>

<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-US>foo</span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-US><![if
!supportEmptyParas]>&nbsp;<![endif]><o:p></o:p></span></p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

--

I just mention a few problems:

a) attribute values in <head> are not quoted

b) Even if "xml" would be a legal element name, it's sitting in a comment.

c) same for the CSS information.


So again: where does Office2000 use XML as a file format???


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joshua Allen [mailto:joshuaa@microsoft.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2000 7:05 AM
> To: 'Michael Champion'; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Cc: 'Julian Reschke'
> Subject: RE: XML in .NET - more than just SOAP?
>
>
> After some excellent suggestions from Julian got me
> thinking, I did some more research and found this
> fairly obscure link:
>
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/officedev/ofxml2k/ofhtml9.exe
>
> It has pretty complete documentation about all of
> the office 2000 XML document formats, including
> DTDs for the various formats.  Basically, Office 2000
> uses XHTML to save documents, and then uses CSS to
> format.  The XHTML *is* well-formed, so you can create
> office docs on any platform that uses XML.  In fact,
> I found a neat page at
> http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200002/xml2001.html
> that tells how to use lotus script on a domino server
> to emit Office 2000 documents dynamically over the web!
> Funny it took a Lotus Notes guy to explain to me what
> kind of XML stuff can be done with Office...
>
> Now, there are some potential criticisms of the O2k approach:
>
> 1) It emits and imports XHTML instead of XML.  Actually, this might not be
> so bad, since (X)HTML was meant to specify document formatting anyway,
> right?  Anyway, this should improve.
>
> 2) Considering when it was released, it uses DTDs heavily and
> uses some XDR
> in there, too.  It will probably shift more toward XSD in the
> next release.
>
> 3) Lots of CSS instead of XSL.  The CSS is designed to degrade
> gracefully to
> various browsers, and formatting semantics are still tagged in the XHTML;
> CSS simply defines the implementation of the formatting.  There's
> no reason
> you couldn't run XSLT against the office 2000 XHTML, though, as
> long as the
> final output is still XHTML with the valid tags, it should load in office
> fine.
>
> For non-document data like settings, etc. there are various
> places where O2k uses straight XML as well, documented in that
> help file above.  Finally, one thing I found fairly cool: take
> any web server, JSP, Servlets, ASP or whatever.  Write a page
> that sets content-type header to "application/x-msexcel".  Now
> output your data as an XHTML table.  As long as the user
> has Office 2000 on their machine, when they browse to your
> page, it will load the data as an excel spreadsheet directly in
> the browser.  I imagine the same goes for word and other apps;
> so it should be fairly trivial to dynamically generate office
> docs from non-MS systems.
>
> Also someone mentioned that you can use an editing tool
> like Frontier, then take the XML generated thus, use something
> like Ishtar (I think?) to convert the XML to RTF and import
> into older versions of Word, like Word 6.0 or whatever..
> I probably have just barely scratched the surface on dumb
> tricks you can do with XML and Office; please forgive my
> posting potentially off-topic stuff; I just know this seemed
> a big question recently, particularly with regards to office...
>
> Thanks,
> Joshua
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Michael Champion [mailto:Mike.Champion@softwareag-usa.com]
> > Sent: Monday, July 24, 2000 1:57 PM
> > To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> > Subject: XML in .NET - more than just SOAP?
> >
> >
> > I didn't get a reply to a previous query, which was buried
> > deep in another
> > message, about the role of XML in Microsoft's .NET
> > initiative.  I'm not
> > ranting, trying to flame .NET, or questioning C# ...  just
> > trying to figure
> > out the answer to one question:
> >
> > A typical article on .NET in the trade press says something like
> > "Microsoft is basing everything on the Extensible Markup
> > Language" (in this
> > case, I'm quoting from
> > http://www.iweek.com/author/redmond.htm)  I've read
> > the .NET whitepaper, various PDC presentations, and much
> > punditry about .NET
> > and the only XML-related components of .NET I hear about are
> > related to
> > SOAP.  Is that all that XML has to contribute to the publicly
> > stated vision
> > of .NET, or am I missing something?
> >
> > More specifically, is there anything about publishing XML
> > formats for the
> > actual content of Office documents (including spreadsheets,
> > PPT slides,
> > etc.)? What about WebForms; is that an XML technology? Can 3rd parties
> > interoperate with .NET components in any way other than via the
> > "intermediate language" and its virtual machine?  One could imagine
> > interoperating with .NET services by exchanging XML
> > "document" data rather
> > than RPC calls with representations of proprietary objects
> > encoded in SOAP,
> > but I'm not finding any direct references to this.
> >
> > Thanks for any help answering this.
> >
>





 

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