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I would be interested in someone explaining just
how an XML Schema for any WYSIWYG system can be
"open" for some qualitative definition of "open".
It is one thing to take a company product line, create
a schema and label it "open", then use the lightning
speed of web hype to drive a market toward it; it is
quite another thing to create a schema which upwardly
or downwardly translates into a sufficient amount of
information to serve as a guarantor of portability.
There ain't no free lunch.
That isn't a dig at MS. I am just as skeptical of the
OASIS version. I have this memory of Java touted as
the "open" language only to have the skepticism that it
is just another "product" be confirmed.
Accepting any XML as "openness" is a defensible position.
It isn't always an effective one. So I'd like to see the
arguments that defend any of these as "open", it being the
case that simply having luminaries on the design team for
a schema based on a company product isn't enough. That
is the oldest dodge in the markup business.
Is there a set of properties that define "open"?
Is there a subset of properties of all office systems
that will make that cut?
My intuition is that at the end of the debate, it will
come down to a system-spec'd schema (one per), and the
ability to apply user-defined schemas. It seems to me that
is precisely what MS proposes and has implemented and that
the system-spec'd schema (OASIS/Sun vs MS) is a Spy vs Spy.
len
From: Sam Hunting [mailto:shunting@etopicality.com]
Has anyone looked under the hood to see what the MS markup is actually
like, and whether it bears any resemblance at all to the efforts for XML office document markup specification now under way at OASIS?
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