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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 10:39:53 -0400 (EDT)
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <r01050400-1026-6D8053E086D011D783370003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>

Gee Whiz!

I went and read (all 4 pages of) the article and found it interesting and
came back to this list in the hopes of getting some analysis of the
article, but that doesn't really seem to be the thrust of this thread.

Everybody seems to be missing that the article is specifically about
Microsoft's plans to use XML to guaranty simultaneous distributability and
security of Office documents.  His main point was that this makes sense
for Microsoft at a marketing level but not at a technological level, and
that because of this, it is only a threat to Open Source if Open Source
makes the mistake of following Microsoft in this direction.

He explicitly plays down Open Source fears and eschews cheap MS bashing
(although he summarizes it nicely).

Chris

On Thu, 15 May 2003, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> AndrewWatt2000@a... writes:
> >http://www.linuxworld.com/2003/0513.murphy.html
> >
> >Following on the discussion about openness of XML etc etc a few weeks
> >back, some on list might find the above URL an interesting read.
>
> While I can't say I really disagree with (or like):
> "Microsoft sees XML as a Web-programming language and not as a framework
> for markup."
>
> I don't think this writer has taken a close look at the subject he's
> describing.  Sure, WordML is a nasty object serialization that happens
> to use XML.  It's also navigable and readable, once you get past a few
> key structural issues - third cousins three times removed is a bit weird
> in XPath.  It's fairly plain that they took the shortest possible route
> to a predictable result rather than contemplating markup, and they
> deserve to be taken to task for that, but that doesn't lead directly to
> Murphy's conclusions.
>
> I have no clue why the OpenOffice folks persist in describing the
> Microsoft Office XML as a threat.  If anything, it makes their own work
> look good and makes it easier to build systems which share information
> across application boundaries.
>
> It might be nice if MSFT had adopted open standards all the way up their
> XML stack, but I'm reasonably content that they are using more open
> standards than they used to support.  Thanks to toolkits that are widely
> available, I can take their pileup and produce something that's
> comfortable for me to use.
>
> --
> Simon St.Laurent
> Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
> Errors, errors, all fall down!
> http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org
>
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