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RE: Common Word Processing Format

• To: 'Michael Champion' <michael.champion@h...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Common Word Processing Format
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:26:40 -0600

And realize that while the XML-Deviants understand most of this, 
the Senators and whoever is arguing in the press and legislative 
bodies probably don't.  They will understand cost.

And what they are doing is fighting over who gets to spend 
the money.  It is the IT guys who understand the lifecycle 
issues and the live data issues.

But live data is important and that hasn't come up often 
enough here or in Atlanta.  Thanks for making me think 
harder, Mike.  I keep forgetting that documents aren't 
just for printing anymore.

len


From: Michael Champion [mailto:michael.champion@h...]

I'm just saying that active business documents populated by enterprise apps 
or databases is a design point for MS Office (at least to hear its 
evangelists discuss the matter) whereas static text documents seem to be the

main design point that ODF evangelists discuss. I try to leave technical 
issues in the ODF/MS Office debate to Brian Jones, so all I'll say in 
defense of that assertion is that MS Office's support for W3C Schema is 
going to make data-oriented applications easier than ODF's support for RELAX

NG will.  Maybe not in principle (I think we've had that debate here), but 
in actual practice today.  Sure, there's gotta be an 80/20 point, but it's 
looking to me like there are a lot of different ones rather than one we can 
all live with.

Hence my conclusion:  As nice as it would be for lots of people to have a 
One Size Fits All universal standard for "office" documents, I don't see any

of the contenders fully fitting the bill.  Some are more oriented to text 
and hand-authoring, others more willing to accomodate ugliness (to an XML 
geek anyway) to make it easier for programs to generate the format and map 
to live data.

As with everything else, the "best" solution in hindsight is unlikely to be 
the one that wins.  If we had it to do all over again, I'll bet something 
like XHTML 2.0 would have been the Right Thing -- basic markup for totally 
generic document concepts, formally extended by namespaces to handle 
graphics, tables, forms, specialized features, etc.; and informally 
extendible by "microformat" conventions to handle domain-specific semantics 
for things like syndication and subscritpion exchange. Oh well...Think of 
all the entertainment value that the browser wars, the RSS wars, the "open" 
document wars, and the "omygod, OPML [expletive deleted], but you have to use it anyway" 
angst brings the geek world :-)

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