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Re: One (jaundiced?) view of Microsoft's vision for XML

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Subject: Re: One (jaundiced?) view of Microsoft's vision for XML
• From: Chris Gray <cpgray@l...>
• Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 13:12:00 -0400 (EDT)
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <r01050400-1026-CD75B03087B511D783370003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>

On Fri, 16 May 2003, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> Yes, that's X-Files, and it doesn't seem like a remotely plausible
> scenario to me.  If Murphy was complaining that Microsoft is shifting
> from an open XML format to the closed .doc format, I might have sympathy
> for it.  In the current situation, I find it simply laughable.
>
> Yes, there's lots of MS dreck in these files.  No, that dreck doesn't
> prohibit you from harvesting (or creating) the things you need.  Short
> of deliberate obfuscation, it's a lot harder to muck up XML than it was
> to muck up HTML.

I take your point; I'm just not sure that XML being an open standard,
implemented in plain text guarantees that it absolutely _cannot_ be
obfuscated.  If "the things you need" are accessible only via an ActiveX
control properly embedded in a standards compliant XHTML page, then all
the XML and HTML tools in the world aren't going to harvest it for you.
Either you write an ActiveX interpreter or you use Microsoft's.

From the article:

"It appears that the Microsoft way to make it harder to copy or distribute
documents will be based on embedding active XML-controls in the documents.
The application reading the document will then first read the
authorization component, perform the appropriate online checks, download
the decryption key for the text itself and then decrypt and process the
remaining XML to produce the document."

This client application will need to go beyond mere XML processing,
however much that will be a component of what it does.

Chris

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