OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

 


 

   Re: [xml-dev] Common Word Processing Format

[ Lists Home | Date Index | Thread Index ]


On Dec 2, 2005, at 6:34 AM, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> Which is fine for someone who can do all of that and doesn't mind.
> Other shops do mind.  Good of the many pertains here.  Good of the
> one is not compromised.
>
> 1.  This thread is centered around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts'
> policy to pick a specification to be their standard word processing
> format.  This isn't about what one guy does in his own shop.  Think
> scale and cost.

And thus it misses a key point.  When it comes to Office Document  
formats, we're really talking about the WP/spreadsheet/presentation  
trio.  Of these three, an increasing proportion of text documents are  
migrating to various forms of HTML, whether this is a good idea or  
not, and the most important office-software component is clearly the  
spreadsheet.  While XHTML is increasingly plausible as a presentation  
package (see S5), and maybe as a text-doc format, nobody is proposing  
it for spreadsheets.  So in the Massachusetts context, XHTML is a red  
herring.

Having said that, I am coming increasingly to the view that if you  
had an editor with a decent GUI, and (crucially) a good change- 
tracking facility, XHTML could plausibly expand to fill pretty well  
all of the workaday-text-document ecosystem.  The Kool Kids want to  
tunnel all sorts of value-adds through here and there and call this  
"Microformats"; I used to sneer at this until I accidentally invented  
a resumé microformat (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/ 
2005/11/12/Resume-Blues).

Having said that, the jury's way out on virtually everything in the  
text-document space.  But I bet that in the year 2389, the Galactic  
Federation will still be doing its budgets in something that is  
recognizably a spreadsheet.  -Tim





 

News | XML in Industry | Calendar | XML Registry
Marketplace | Resources | MyXML.org | Sponsors | Privacy Statement

Copyright 2001 XML.org. This site is hosted by OASIS