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>From: Robert Koberg <rob@koberg.com>
>To: Michael Champion <michael.champion@hotmail.com>
>CC: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
>Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Common Word Processing Format
>Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:24:55 -0500
>
>How is a distributed (by its nature) MS Office document better for live
>data versus something that lives at a centralized location?
I'm just saying that active business documents populated by enterprise apps
or databases is a design point for MS Office (at least to hear its
evangelists discuss the matter) whereas static text documents seem to be the
main design point that ODF evangelists discuss. I try to leave technical
issues in the ODF/MS Office debate to Brian Jones, so all I'll say in
defense of that assertion is that MS Office's support for W3C Schema is
going to make data-oriented applications easier than ODF's support for RELAX
NG will. Maybe not in principle (I think we've had that debate here), but
in actual practice today. Sure, there's gotta be an 80/20 point, but it's
looking to me like there are a lot of different ones rather than one we can
all live with.
Hence my conclusion: As nice as it would be for lots of people to have a
One Size Fits All universal standard for "office" documents, I don't see any
of the contenders fully fitting the bill. Some are more oriented to text
and hand-authoring, others more willing to accomodate ugliness (to an XML
geek anyway) to make it easier for programs to generate the format and map
to live data.
As with everything else, the "best" solution in hindsight is unlikely to be
the one that wins. If we had it to do all over again, I'll bet something
like XHTML 2.0 would have been the Right Thing -- basic markup for totally
generic document concepts, formally extended by namespaces to handle
graphics, tables, forms, specialized features, etc.; and informally
extendible by "microformat" conventions to handle domain-specific semantics
for things like syndication and subscritpion exchange. Oh well...Think of
all the entertainment value that the browser wars, the RSS wars, the "open"
document wars, and the "omygod, OPML sucks, but you have to use it anyway"
angst brings the geek world :-)
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