>Here's an interesting article on the not-so-open-Office 11. >http://news.com.com/2100-1001-977880.html?tag=lh
It's pretty clear the author of this article did not a) see Office 11 in action himself, and b) bring much understanding about XML to the piece Well, I can personally claim a) and at least faintly resemble b)... The screenshots on MSDN are not fake moon landings. As near as I can tell, the product does what it says, and although one should always be alert and skeptical about MS products (esp. those still in beta), this one has loads of promise. Let's start with the default schema. If you are going to save "Word as XML," you have to have one. There's no way for the software to understand *a priori* the semantics (though some other companies are working on this -- and on that you should be *really* skeptical). Even if Microsoft turns its back on its own developers and doesn't release the schema (unlikely), you will still see scads of publicly-available transforms to a variety of other formats. I saw the auto-generated XML. It's not that complicated. There are tags like <author> and <para>. The key thing here is that it's now just *text*, in a valid, standard, internationally-recognized format. That huge corpus of knowledge locked up in a binary, proprietary format is now available to machines and the human eye alike in an interoperable format that is substantially more intelligent than just plain ASCII output. It's worth noting here that the technology MS has introduced appears no stronger than what you could already buy from smallish 3rd-parties today and use as plugins (one possible exception: the XSLT generator in FrontPage looks on the surface to lead the field). The key here is that these capabilities will now come as a *default,* embedded and supported within each desktop around the world using the product. And, as others have noted, MS assumes that many customers will create and install their own schemas. Nothing I could see prevents you from doing that. In fact, MS encourages it. Makes the suite more valuable. An interesting sidebar is that there is no support for DTDs, at a time when -- I'm guessing here -- the transition from DTDs to schemas among experienced information designers seems quite incomplete. There'll be work out there for people who know their way around an xsd file... In short, if Office 11 really lives up to its promise, I think it will have a huge impact on content management, and bring in much greater relief the already sizable differences among CMS vendors in the way that they deal with XML. Cheers! -------------------------------------------- Tony Byrne Founder, Managing Editor CMSWatch http://www.cmswatch.com Silver Spring, MD USA V: 301-585-7004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Content Management Matters" -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
