xml-dev - RE: XML in Office 200X

[sam th <sytobinh@uchicago.edu>]

On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, Thierry Bezecourt wrote:

> At 08:53 01/08/2000 -0700, Ashvil wrote:
> > > From: Thierry Bezecourt [mailto:thbz@thbz.cx]
> > > I don't see how
> > > an XML output in Office could be really useful except for
> >Snip
> > > I would be interested in real-world use cases.
> >
> >There were postings earlier that implied that abiword, kword, star
> >office currently have xml formats. Could someone please post urls to
> >those formats. I could not find them. Maybe we can infer some
> >real-world use cases by looking at them.
> 
> I tried AbiWord today, and I liked it.  However, while
> the files are stored as XML (http://www.abisource.com/dev_faq.phtml), it 
> seems to be intended for internal usage more than for interoperating for 
> other applications.  When you save a file, there is no "Save as XML" option 
> ; there is a "Save as AbiWord" option.  You need to be curious and edit the 
> .abw file with a text editor to discover that this "AbiWord" format is XML.

Well, this is just because our native file format is an XML application.
The most important thing for most users is that it's our format, not that
it's XML.  However, all our documents (and even our preferences and
translations) are doen as XML.  

> 
> Publishing the internal file format is a good thing 
> (http://www.abisource.com/awml.dtd), but stating that it can be used by 
> other applications would mean that the DTD must be *stable* and documented. 
> I don't think this is realistic, because the developers may want to modify 
> the internal file format for many reasons. Again, I don't know if the 
> intention of the AbiWord developers is to state that their file format is 
> (or will be) stable and usable by other applications in the real world. And 
> sam th is welcome to flame me for any error I may have written here.
> 

Our file format DTD is currently ever-so-slightly out of date ( I should
fix that later today).  There is likely to be one more significant file
format change before AbiWord 1.0 (which hopefully will be later this
year).  The schema (http://www.abisource.com/~sam/awml/abiword-schema.xsd)
is at the same revision level as the DTD. The Schema complies with the
lates W3C Schema draft.  I hope to eventually create RELAX and Schematron
schemas as well, but I do have more pressing concerns.

> >Also, if it is not too much trouble, please submit those xml file
> >schemas to the xml.org schema repository.
> 
> When I go to http://www.xml.org/registry/ and click on "Search XML 
> Schemas", I receive an "Access Denied" error.  I won't help people who 
> won't help me, whatever their reason may be.

From their home page, it doesn't look like they have set up searching yet.
I will try to submit the AbiWord DTD/Schema to them.  

As a side note, AbiWord is to the best of my knowledge the only word
procesor that exports compliant XHTML.  

				sam th
				sam@uchicago.edu
				http://www.abisource.com/~sam