3B1F111B.62A37ECB@allette.com.au">
I have been listening to this debate for quite some time and have a vested interest as my company makes a product that does "up convert" MS-Office documents to well formed XML.
As I understand it, you have created applications that allows the capture of a
certain class of documents only though. If you wanted to create different documents
tomorrow, you would have to program again, wouldn't you? The original poster asked
about "using MS Word as XML editor (ideally like FrameMaker+SGML)" - that's not
really what you're doing, is it? You rely on being able to predict (or discard)
structure, whereas FM+SGML will XML-ise any structured or word processed document.
While you make a very good point, the reality is that the cost of retraining
millions of MS-Office users to use powerful XML Editors is enormous. But
the benefits of getting content into XML for reuse is huge. It can save
organizations tons of money by reducing manual cutting and pasting and errors
in re-entering. What is wrong if we can get a large part of the way there
by using domain specific constraints and then installing a less laborious
and less cumbersome process of "cleaning up markup errors". You can not
argue that it does not have value although it may not be perfect? As for the programming for different types of documents, one way to address it is XSLT and a good XSLT development tool.