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- From: Didier PH Martin <martind@netfolder.com>
- To: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>,'Julian Reschke' <julian.reschke@gmx.de>,'Michael Champion' <Mike.Champion@softwareag-usa.com>, xml-dev@lists.xml.org
- Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 07:51:16 -0400
Hi Joshua,
Joshua said:
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.
Didier replies:
OK I did some investigations on my side too. The result is: no, neither
excel nor word produce xml documents since I have to do some post processing
in order to get the files to be processed by an XML interpreter (i.e. an
xinclude, XSLT, xforms processor). I tried to get a file produced by Excel
or Word to be processed by an xinclude and an XSLT processor and I got
parsing errors!!! right there, this is not XML, maybe MML (Microsoft Markup
Language) but surely not XML. You are right Joshua, it is not perfect but
hard to accept from a company having 10 000 developers, plenty of cash, and
having on board people knowledgeable about XML.
However, to keep things equal, I should say that a well formed XML document
could be read and edited by Excel (I didn't tried Word but tried for excel).
So yes, an app can produce an XML document that can be edited by Excel. I
was even able to create a table from a data base, get the XML document
created from the database, make a small XSLT transform and get it display in
excel as a chart. Frankly I was amazed.
Conclusion:
Excel (I didn't performed the tests on word) can read xml documents and
edit, make charts, etc... from this xml document. However, a document
produced by excel or word are formatted as MML (Microsoft Markup Language)
but surely not as XML. So, inbound processing is OK, outbound processing is
not.
Anyway, thanks Joshua for at last helping us notice that an XML document
could be processed by Excel.
cheers
Didier PH Martin
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