OASIS to create an open office application format

Posted Nov 21, 2002 17:14 UTC (Thu) by dbreakey (guest, #1381)
In reply to: OASIS to create an open office application format by akumria
Parent article: OASIS to create an open office application format

Just because Office XP uses an XML-based file format doesn't mean it will be significantly easier to decipher; it only simplifies and standardizes the parsing engine used to break the document down into its constituent parts.

There's nothing stopping Microsoft from defining tags for which meanings are unclear. As a for instance, from a purely technical POV, what stopped the originators of HTML from defining—to use an absurd example—<xylophone> as the opening tag for a paragraph, instead of <p>?

Absolutely nothing. It was simply an interest in making HTML markup 'human-readable' that lead them to choose the tags they did; a computer could care less what the tag is defined as.

Use of an XML-based file format can simplify the process of decoding the structure of a document, but it's certainly possible, if they chose to, for Microsoft to make it incredibly difficult to decode any meaningful context from that file. And what stops them from using a proprietary and exclusive compression algorithm to compress the XML file, anyway?

So, does Office XP pull any of these tricks? I'm curious to know ...

OASIS to create an open office application format

Posted Nov 22, 2002 1:46 UTC (Fri) by titousensei (guest, #4144) [Link]

You're right: not only unclear tags can be used, but also the interaction between tags is undefined. RTF is an ASCII based format, fully documented by MS, but impossible to use because of conflicting document layout definitions.
Moreover, there's many ways to describe how to render pages. MS's description might not be the one we are looking for. After all, rtf is not, postscript is not, tex is not, html is not, abiword's xml is not.