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- From: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- To: 'Julian Reschke' <julian.reschke@gmx.de>,'Michael Champion' <Mike.Champion@softwareag-usa.com>, xml-dev@lists.xml.org
- Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 03:04:02 -0700
OK, I have looked more closely and Word's output is not entirely
"well-formed". On the other hand, it displays nicely in a
wide range of browsers. Also, it took me only five minutes
to figure out what I need to do to the file to be able
to run XSL transforms against it using Saxon, Xalan, etc.
grep|tr|cut can do wonders..
So, while it is not perfect (and it will get better)
it seems to me to be quite useful. I call it XML,
although a purist could nitpick some of the flaws.
If you want to use XSL/XML to read and/or generate office
docs, you can do it quite easily. If you want to
build solutions that work today, you can. If you want
to wait, things will probably conform much better.
I suggest you read the documents I pointed out and
try some things. Try sending XML out a servlet as
application/x-msexcel and see what happens; it really
does work. Just try things! It is not so hard..
Ken, re: your question about the format -- it *is* a
self-extracting .EXE and unpacks to a .chm file.
I'm not sure how you could view it on non-windows
systems; I've never tried viewing .chm on anything else.
You could always install our VM (Win2k) on one of your
machines :-) If you know a way to look at HTML help
(.chm) on your system, I can send the .chm to you
as well.. And whoever is about to suggest that we make
those docs available as .htm -- great idea!
Thanks,
-Joshua
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Julian Reschke [mailto:julian.reschke@gmx.de]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2000 1:59 AM
> To: Joshua Allen; 'Michael Champion'; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Cc: 'Julian Reschke'
> Subject: RE: XML in .NET - more than just SOAP?
>
>
> 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]> <![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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