Volition

A lot of people seem to be confused about the forthcoming XML support in Word 2003. Below is a marked-up copy of an email I sent which I hope clears up some of the confusion. It was in response to the news that only the high-end versions of Office would ship with this much-vaunted functionality.

ObUntriedDisclaimer: I haven't actually used Word 2003, this is all based on what I have been able to discern from Microsoft's web site.

Ian wrote:
>
> So much for supporting an industry standard. Deja vu anybody?

Well, it's not like they're completely dropping it. However I think this forthcoming support for XML in Word is quite vastly misunderstood - probably by about 99.99% of everyone who has heard of it. People seem to be equating XML support with using XML as it's native document format, which does not follow at all. Regardless of whether or not you get the version that has "XML support", the native file format will still be a mangled, crapped-out, pseudo-XML format similar to that used by Word 2000 and XP. You still won't be able to read native Word documents with a normal XML parser. You still won't get easy cross-word-processor-application compatibility. The forthcoming XML support will not change this situation at all; Word documents will continue to be a closed format.

Word 2003's support for XML should actually be quite good - you define an XML Schema (which defines the structure of the document), give that to Word, and it lets you author valid XML documents based on that schema in some sort of visual way. This is very important - it gives the world a useful XML editor which may even be usable by the masses. It also means that Word 2003 should be able to edit any sort of XML document, provided you have a schema for it, which in turn means you should be able to edit OOo documents, or documents conforming to the open word-processing document format that is being ratified by OASIS, all in Word.

If we're lucky, it may let you define rudimentary styles (using CSS if we're really lucky) for XML elements allowed by the schema so that people editing the XML documents get some sort of emulated WYSIWYG environment, but I'm not sure if that will be the case.

Now, all this is nice, but only really useful for those who care enough to do proper structured document editing (instead of the arbitrary WYSIWYG crap that so many people/companies produce these days). Those who care will be large corporations, governments and specalists such as technical writers or people working on documentation projects. Those who won't care are home users and small businesses - they want to produce some result in the quickest, easiest possible way, and writing good structured

So what Microsoft is doing is fair enough - they're leaving out a feature that typical home/small business users will not need and as a result they can charge more for the corporate version which does have this feature.

They still suck because they'll be using a native format which is closed, but if we're going to bash Microsoft, we need to do right. ;)

/mike