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RE: Common Word Processing Format

• To: "Nathan Young -X (natyoung - Artizen at Cisco)" <natyoung@c...>
• Subject: RE: Common Word Processing Format
• From: Uche Ogbuji <Uche.Ogbuji@f...>
• Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 19:33:41 -0700
• Cc: Robert Koberg <rob@k...>,Peter Hunsberger <peter.hunsberger@g...>,"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>,xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <0DF8CBE327D4654F8567FD8123E328B10103435B@x...>
• Organization: Fourthought, Inc.
• References: <0DF8CBE327D4654F8567FD8123E328B10103435B@x...>

On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 11:00 -0800, Nathan Young -X (natyoung - Artizen
at Cisco) wrote:
> If we're talking about a document format to replace MS word documents,
> we need much more than XHTML.  XHTML holds the content of the document
> and provides (some) semantic information about that content.  To
> replicate what a word doc can do and does do for most users, you have to
> also specify how it's going to display and probably provide some
> information to the application about how the editing experience should
> be presented.

I don't know why I'm even bothering with such a hopelessly subjective
debate, but since everyone here seems to be so eager to crown XHTML for
office formats, I'll pip up and say say:

Thank GODDESS for the OO XML project, Microsoft's partially reformed
Office XML format team, and all others who are saving us from the abject
horror of having to contemplate XHTML as an office file format.

Are you kidding me?

All arguments for XHTML everywhere eventually boil down to arguments
that rather than 

<monty>
  <python/>
</monty>

I should write:

<div class="monty">
  <span class="python"/>
</div class"monty">

No bloody thank you.  Freedom from naming-by-committee is what drew me
to XML in the first place.  I am not about to chuck that freedom for the
very false comfort of a protean generic identifier.

And when I hear people preaching that people should stop writing new XML
vocabularies, I just wonder who's been passing out the XHTML
+Atom-is-all-you-need Kool-Aid.

I'll use XHTML for Web content, ODF for documents of more typical
front-office style, Atom for Web feeds and information that is extremely
easy to mistake for a Web feed, XBEL for links and Web resource
directories (not XOXO-cum-XHTML, not OPML, not even Atom), and so on.

I have great tools and technologies such as RNG, XSLT, Schematron and
more to manage diverse formats, and I see no reason to wallow in a
narrow markup dungeon.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net                    http://fourthought.com
http://copia.ogbuji.net                   http://4Suite.org
Articles: http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/publications/

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