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RE: Whitepapers and ScreenShots of Office 11 XML Features

• To: 'Sam Hunting' <shunting@e...>
• Subject: RE: Whitepapers and ScreenShots of Office 11 XML Features
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 10:40:29 -0600
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

I would be interested in someone explaining just 
how an XML Schema for any WYSIWYG system can be 
"open" for some qualitative definition of "open".

It is one thing to take a company product line, create 
a schema and label it "open", then use the lightning 
speed of web hype to drive a market toward it; it is 
quite another thing to create a schema which upwardly 
or downwardly translates into a sufficient amount of 
information to serve as a guarantor of portability. 
There ain't no free lunch.

That isn't a dig at MS.  I am just as skeptical of the 
OASIS version.    I have this memory of Java touted as 
the "open" language only to have the skepticism that it
is just another "product" be confirmed.

Accepting any XML as "openness" is a defensible position. 
It isn't always an effective one.  So I'd like to see the 
arguments that defend any of these as "open", it being the 
case that simply having luminaries on the design team for 
a schema based on a company product isn't enough.   That 
is the oldest dodge in the markup business.

Is there a set of properties that define "open"?

Is there a subset of properties of all office systems 
that will make that cut?

My intuition is that at the end of the debate, it will 
come down to a system-spec'd schema (one per), and the 
ability to apply user-defined schemas.  It seems to me that 
is precisely what MS proposes and has implemented and that 
the system-spec'd schema (OASIS/Sun vs MS) is a Spy vs Spy.

len


From: Sam Hunting [mailto:shunting@e...]

Has anyone looked under the hood to see what the MS markup is actually
like, and whether it bears any resemblance at all to the efforts for XML office document markup specification now under way at OASIS?

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Whitepapers and ScreenShots of Office 11 XML Featur es
    • From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...>
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    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • RE: Whitepapers and ScreenShots of Office 11 XML Features
    • From: "bryan" <bry@i...>
  • Re: Whitepapers and ScreenShots of Office 11 XML Featur es
    • From: "Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@a...>

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