Jean Paoli for Microsoft and Daniel Vogelheim for OpenOffice both
chose the same title "XML for the masses" for their presentations, a
commonality which hides two very different approaches from the editors of two
competing office productivity suites.
The strategy of OpenOffice is to focus on the XML format natively used to
store the documents. In his presentation,
Daniel Vogelheim gave an overview of the OpenOffice XML format and
justified the design decisions taken to meet the following requirements:
- use existing standards - don't reinvent the wheel
- "transformability" - the format must be usable outside of the office
application
- first class XML - all structured content must be accessible through XML
structures
The result is a complex format (over 450 elements and more than 1600
attributes), with a good amount of redundancy but easily readable and easily
transformable: to some extent, this is an XML format for the users more than
for the developers!
This format has been given as an input to the OpenOffice OASIS Technical Committee to
create a to create an "open, XML-based file format specification for office
applications."
For Microsoft, the strategy appears to be to bring XML
tools on each desktop and leave each user free to choose his own schemas
rather than promoting an XML office format which will be specific to
Microsoft, and for which a licensing model is still unclear.
If the target of Microsoft Office 11 is to deliver XML tools to the
masses, the target of OpenOffice is to become the XML office format for the
masses!
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