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From: <AndrewWatt2000@aol.com>
>
> Re-examining some of the recent discussion it seems to me that some of the
> pleas for fully open XML in office suites is simply thinly veiled special
> pleading for the XML geek lobby. Making a fully open XML in an office
suite
> empowers not the user but the XML geek. So, in effect, the plea for fully
> open XML is, in some respects at least, a selfish request. One might even
> suggest that it would increase the power and revenue earning potential of
XML
> geeks (at the expense of the office suite vendors). Moving power or data
> ownership from proprietary vendors to our own XML geekdom may be less
> altruistic than it at first appears.
Yes, but it's usually us geeks who create the tools the average users use.
As a result, the benefit does still get passed along to the average user. I
agree that many users will care little about the angle brackets. But by
giving it to the geeks, we get to create a whole new set of abilities (e.g.
Infopath?) that the users can take advantage of (and still not know the
first thing about xml). Trying to do this same thing with proprietary file
formats is simply out of the question, especially for the third-party geeks.
In the end, I think the altruism can be translated into something like "if
the vendors make it easier for the geeks, the geeks can make it easier for
the average users"...
---
Seairth Jacobs
seairth@seairth.com
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