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On Fri, 11 Apr 2003 19:12:54 -0400, Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>
wrote:
> So basically the really complex and rule breaking changes introduced
> in MS Office XML support will not be very popular.
> This gives more time to OpenOffice to deploy, perfect :-)
Au contraire, I think. The nasty WordML stuff will be the only "XML"
supported in most versions of Office. To get the ability to work with your
own or other people's schemas you need to pay the big bucks. Most
specifically, in order for Word to work with an OpenOffice-generated
document, you need the high-end version. [Or maybe you had something else
in mind vis a vis the "complex and rule breaking changes" ... maybe their
bizarre way of mapping URNs to schemas?]
One might argue that it creates a window of opportunity for OpenOffice
because the XML it generates is so much more practical for downstream
applications to work with than WordML, I guess. I honestly don't see why
they bother with WordML; what is the *point* of storing data in XML if the
schema is so hideous and proprietary than no one can use it without
proprietary API support? What advantages does WordML have over the HTML-
like stuff that current versions of Word generate on request? At least you
can tidy.exe the HTML-like stuff into standard XML, but what can you do
with WordML except load it into Word ... unless of course you are an XSLT
uber-geek? [only a semi-rhetorical question ... I would love to hear a
rational explanation of why WordML exists.]
Sigh, I thought Office 2003 looked too good to be true. I was a fool, but
I believed ...
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