"The language of the internet" [LWN.net]

"The language of the internet"

Posted Dec 1, 2005 14:18 UTC (Thu) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778)
Parent article: When Is a Standard Truly Open? - When It's Universal, Reflections on Massachusetts and Microsoft's XML

This is mostly a good article, with some interesting ways of looking at the issue. However, I wasn't impressed with the last section, where somehow the XML format (roughly speaking, a schema) used for office documents gets confused with the XML "schemas" used for web pages and web services.

It's not a perfect analogy, but XML is more like an alphabet than a language. Imagine that all the world's human languages shared a single writing script, such as the Latin letters used in English. Microsoft might control the English language (office doc schema) that is built with these letters, but that has no direct impact on the French or Thai languages (other XML schemas) built with the same letters. There are thousands of uses of XML that have nothing to do with the office doc XML schema.

Unless Microsoft is planning to modify the rules of XML itself (the alphabet), this debate really is only about office docs. The outcome will *indirectly* affect similar discussions in other domains, but would have no direct technical effect.

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"The language of the internet"

Posted Dec 1, 2005 23:21 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

kevinbsmith's point is that nobody is talking about Microsoft extensions to XML; the article is flawed. They're talking about Microsoft extending something else. I would like to know what that is, and if it is a standard that has a name.

XML is not a language for writing documents, like HTML is. But I see a lot of people use the term "XML" as if it is. I suppose it's the same kind of mistake that leads people to use "IDE" (the technology of packaging a disk controller with the disk drive) as if it were a protocol for attaching a disk device to a computer. (In particular, they're thinking of the protocol called "ATA", one of many protocols that are implemented by IDE disk devices).

So does anyone know: Is there some XML-based document standard that Massachusetts is considering adopting? Does it have a name? Is there a Microsoft alternative, and does it have name?

Microsoft Extensions

Posted Dec 2, 2005 13:39 UTC (Fri) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link]

My understanding is that there is a non-proprietary XML-based document format named "Open Document Format", used by several office apps (word processors, spreadsheets, etc). Microsoft has their own similar (but proprietary) format named "Microsoft Office Open XML". Apparently MS is proposing turning their format into an ECMA standard, but they would still have proprietary extensions (presumably schema extensions, with new tags or new meanings for existing tags) that could only be reliably written and read by their own products.

Any product that reads or writes office documents is affected by this. And of course if MS wins this battle, it will be harder for anyone to push for governments to use other open formats like OGG or non-proprietary calendaring. This is an important decision, and it will have broad effects throughout the US and elsewhere, whether MS wins or loses.

But, to my knowlege, in the context of the Massachusetts/Open Document Format debate, MS is not saying they will mangle XML itself (the underlying rules of tags, attributes, etc) in any way that would have a technical effect on any XML format or app outside the office suite domain. So XHTML, the XML format used by all modern web pages, seems unlikely to be affected by the outcome of this battle. Likewise, web service XML formats, including blog feeds and SOAP transactions should be safe from harm here.