Re: [xml-dev] One (jaundiced?) view of Microsoft's vision for XML

[ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)]

"Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com> writes:

> I have no clue why the OpenOffice folks persist in describing the
> Microsoft Office XML as a threat.  If anything, it makes their own work
> look good and makes it easier to build systems which share information
> across application boundaries.  

I hope it encourages them to clean up their act.  I haven't looked at
the MSO XML yet, but I _have_ done a bunch of work with the OOffice
XML for Impress (== Powerpoint), and it has at least one serious bug,
namely that a slide like this

  * Point 1
    - Point 1a
    - Point 1b
  * Point 2

is represented as (simplifying away all but the relevant bits):

 <list><item>Point 1</item></list>

 <list><item><list><item>Point 1a</item></list></item></list>

 <list><item><list><item>Point 1b</item></list></item></list>
 
 <list><item>Point 2</item></list>

I consider this to be tag abuse, and turning it in to something you
can work with is deeply tedious.  Once I'm convinced I've got all the
bugs out I'll post my stylesheets for cleaning this up, but if anyone
knows the relevant people please encourage them to fix this at source.

ht
-- 
  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
                      Half-time member of W3C Team
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