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

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: One (jaundiced?) view of Microsoft's vision for XML
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 13:42:21 -0400
• In-reply-to: <Pine.SOL.4.44.0305161244510.3429-100000@l...>

cpgray@l... (Chris Gray) writes:
>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.

I guess I'm more interested in the traditional content of the document
than in any ActiveXish junk Microsoft might see fit to throw into it.
I'm happy enough at this point to have access to the parts of these
documents I've valued in the past.

>>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.

If they're encrypting the document contents in some way that makes them
proprietary, I'll be worried about it.  So far, the worst things I've
found are lousy markup design and base64, neither of which is
insuperable.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org

• References:
  • Re: One (jaundiced?) view of Microsoft's vision for XML
    • From: Chris Gray <cpgray@l...>

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