Microsoft's XML output for Office, esp with regard to Word, is problem displacement being mistaken for problem solution.
Certainly the output will be *human readable* in contrast with Word's existing file format, but beyond that you'll be hard-pressed to convince long-time Office developers and users that Microsoft's planned Office XML output will help solve their existing CM/KM problems or improve upon their current solutions. In the world of MS Word, styles roughly = markup, albeit markup that really only makes sense to Microsoft's own applications. From a programming perspective, well-styled Word .doc documents are just as easy to parse today (within the MS Office environment) as valid XML documents. And from a writer's perspective, applying markup should be no more difficult than applying paragraph and character styles. As someone who has worked extensively with Office application and document object models for the past several years, in the context of content management systems, I can confidently state that the utility of Office's XML output (outside of a Microsoft environment) will ultimately depend on where and how XML is applied by Microsoft at the application and document levels, and user diligence. I suspect we'll face many of the same problems that we face today. Only instead of complaining about the quality and consistency of the paragraph and character styles as applied by the end-users, we'll complain about the quality and consistency of meaningful markup. Joe . -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
