While decidedly thin on details, it's always great to hear that the formats are changing yet again. Here's hoping they don't encumber them with submarine patents or shady licenses like the other ones. It wouldn't surprise me if such things would get involved as they're the new Office default formats...
I, too, have a hard time believing Microsoft is going to be open and play fair...I thought MS's whole idea of XML was chunks of binary stuff wrapped up within an XML structure, anyway....
the article wrote:
Murphy said that there will likely be some trepidation on the part of customers concerned that compatibility issues will surface with the introduction of the new formats. And he said that it may be unrealistic to expect the decreased file sizes being promised by Microsoft, but he believes that people will respond positively to the expanded XML strategy in general.
In other words, it's all just a feel-good marketing ploy Toss in the word XML to make people excited and believe that suddenly MS has gone open....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
If it's true though, for some as-yet-not-understood reason that MS is actually going to follow through with this... then it sounds like a good thing. I'd much rather have an XML-based format replace .doc as a standard.
If they're using this for untoward purposes, say part of a strategy to embrace & extend or to somehow assert patent claims against OO.o or something like that.... well, f 'm.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:43 pm Post subject:
It probably will be XML and will be readily readable. The catch will be the licensing terms that are attached to its schemas. It's almost a very clever trick...they can claim to have an open standard but still prevent the standard from being used in open source software. In that sense it may be no better than .doc since we'll have to wait for someone to develop "clean room" schemas
The article did mention that if it opens as .doc it'll still save as .doc, so I suspect the binary format will still be around for decades to come. Not to mention their DRMd formats too. I highly suspect that password protected documents will still have their contents exposed in unencrypted XML.
It probably will be XML and will be readily readable. The catch will be the licensing terms that are attached to its schemas. It's almost a very clever trick...they can claim to have an open standard but still prevent the standard from being used in open source software. In that sense it may be no better than .doc since we'll have to wait for someone to develop "clean room" schemas
How hard can it be to reverse-engineer an XML schema? I mean, it's pretty much all there for you to see... And yeah, there may be some options in a DTD that aren't apparent from looking at a couple documents, but over a couple weeks I'd think a clean room DTD should get better and better very quickly. In fact, couldn't you write a program (if it doesn't exist already) where you just drop known valid & legal XML files into it and it builds a DTD based on what it sees in the file? Ie, every new XML file that gives information that it didn't already have would evolve the DTD, so that after a few thousand documents it would probably be pretty darn close to the official schema... and of course, over time, you could dump a million more files in and get even closer...
I saw somewhere that the license was going to basically exclude the GPL from using the file, but I don't quite get how they can do that-- what exactly is licensed that prohibits it?
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Toss in the word XML to make people excited and believe that suddenly MS has gone open....
