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- From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- To: johns@syscore.com (John F. Schlesinger),'Chris Lovett' <clovett@microsoft.com>, xml-dev@lists.xml.org
- Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 12:32:00 -0400
At 12:11 PM 7/31/00 -0400, John F. Schlesinger wrote:
>It seems hard to reconcile these statements with the claim that Microsoft
>never said that Office 2000 would generate XML. In particular, the claim
>that, with this capability in Office, "Microsoft is delivering XML
>technology first" is clearly an attempt to position Office as an XML
>technology platform. It may be that Microsoft marketing went overboard in
>claiming to be delivering XML technology (rather than using (near) XML
>technology in its products). The result is that people like me
>mis-interpreted the statements above to mean that Word 2000 would be an XML
>authoring tool. I think that the mis-information referred to below is not
>all on the side of people like me.
I think they did an awful job of explaining it, but there seems to be a
different view of XML at Microsoft than at the rest of the world.
From documents like those, it seems clear that they see XML as something
you can put _into_ a document to do things like add extra Word-specific
information. Much of the rest of the world (and I'd argue the XML
specification) sees XML as _being_ the document, and if the document isn't
XML, none of it is.
I'd like very much to see Microsoft take the very small steps they'd need
to make Office 2000 spit out XML-compliant HTML (not strictly conforming
XHTML, until modularization makes their extensions possible), but I think
there's a larger philosophial problem afoot that may not reflect bad faith.
Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books
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