"Standardizing on XML" is far from useless!

re: "Standardizing on XML" is far from useless!

Stephane Rodriguez — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 13:19:18 GMT

"To be sure, XML tags are just labels without any intrinsic meaning. In the case at hand, however, the tags mostly describe how wordprocessors display text or spreadsheets processes data; almost all modern software uses the same semantics for headings, comments, formulae, rows/columns, etc."

To take an analogy, it seems obvious from what you say that you have never written an html renderer. The semantics is everything. Describing the layout of objects or relations between objects always leaves its share of degrees of freedom. Just take very simple html, and render it in several different major web browsers : you'll notice that the rendering is not the same (and that's not just lazy coders who ignored the specs).

Xml is not everything, it's just the way that Tim Bray and others have found to fix the encoding and carriage return problems. So by any mean, I would recommend to store content as Xml rather than plain text for that reason. But to extend the reasoning to highly descriptions of rich objects (including objects that have to be 64-base encoded, obviously) like those found in word processors is quite a stance.

re: "Standardizing on XML" is far from useless!

Stephane Rodriguez — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 13:33:40 GMT

Also on Excel. Excel's XML is very limited, does not support charts, shapes and other objects. Only about data you said? I don't think so. It's more about proper round-trip, period.

I happen to be writing Excel generators for a while already, and that's not simple. For instance, I have been writing an extensive generator for almost two years, and still am not out of that yet. Whether I had decided instead to write my own spreadsheet format, it would have taken time a couple weeks to define whatever xml describing an "Excel" spreadsheet alternative. So what I am saying here is that you seem to rather ignore the fact that new formats like Xml back from Office 2000 and up, just like the new Xml in Office 12 has been the opportunity for the Office team to work on new codebase. Very sexy since in comparison a lot of people are simply maintaining code.

I am pretty sure that Office 12 is just one step and expect Office 13 or 14 to overtake the existing native run-times with Avalonized and XPSes run-times. So perhaps Massachussets understands that the semantics of the said formats are not going to settle anytime soon.

re: "Standardizing on XML" is far from useless!

Simon Phipps — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 12:08:49 GMT

Is there a way to trackback here? I cited you in http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=a_study_in_framing

Your arguments would all be fine if the users of office productivity suites were developers, but they are not. Applications need a single vocabulary - transforms are the domain of programmers, not document creators. Insisting that a developer technology gives end-users freedom from lock-in is a profound (if common) error.

re: "Standardizing on XML" is far from useless!

Alex — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 02:25:46 GMT

What a load of Hogwash. Microsoft just can't admit that they want to lock customers in!

re: "Standardizing on XML" is far from useless!

Robert Aitchison — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:57:58 GMT

The complaint I keep hearing from the OSS avociates is that the Microsoft XML document formats are patented or something and this restriction would preclude an open source appllication from properly implementing the Microsoft format due to incompatibilities between the two licenses.

If that's true it seems like they have a legitimate complaint, if it's not and OpenOffice or any application covered by the GPL could fully implement the Microsoft XML document format it seems they don't.

More on Design by Committee

mikechampion's weblog — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:28:10 GMT

Michael Rys says in a comment on the previous post "I personally think
that XQuery is not bad for having...

re: "Standardizing on XML" is far from useless!

Eduardo — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 02:03:15 GMT

Mike, suppose that a significant portion of Office users decided that they would like Microsoft to add the optional ability to import and export OpenDocument files.

Do you think Microsoft should do this? Do you think they would?

re: "Standardizing on XML" is far from useless!

taotao — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 20:19:38 GMT

In regards to Tim Bray's comment "...interoperability and business value are all about shared semantics...", I think that he is referring to "...the real semantics of a document...conveyed between the author and the reader". That's what "shared semantics" intrinsically means. I think that any one with common sense would understand that.

Shared semantics also means that we don't need more XSLT interfaces to translate between data types in what has become a sea of incompatible data types that exists today.

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