Webdeveloper article on MS-XML in Office 2000....

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 04:09 PM 4/6/99 +0100, Mark Birbeck wrote:
>Could look at it another way and say that now anyone can create a file
>that could be edited or viewed by MS tools. For example, you could have
>a database of information that is exported as XML and then pushed
>through one stylesheet to make it viewable by MS PowerPoint, and another
>to make it editable by MS Word. And of course there's no reason why you
>couldn't use another stylesheet to edit the relevant data in a Lotus
>spreadsheet. None of these applications need even exist on the web
>server. (I thought open file formats and structures was one of the goals
>of XML.)

You certainly _can_ do it, but it'll be a pain in the neck, given the way
they seem to have written their code.  XSL might ease the pain of
converting my 'meaningful' XML into their 'MS-XML' XML, but I don't think
it'll be pretty or exciting.  Microsoft seems to have asked "what's the
easiest way to dump our application structures into XML?" rather than "how
can we best represent this information in XML?"  

It's their choice, certainly - but it's also my choice not to be limited by
their decision and to encourage others to look for better alternatives.

>BTW, it would save a lot of time if someone came up with a stylesheet
>that transforms everything into a conspiracy theory. I could then save
>space on my hard-drive by just storing the original news item, and then
>just use the stylesheet to 'view' the conspiracy theory when I needed
>to. ;)

Corporations are conspiracies to make a profit.  Where's the surprise
there?  It's just that certain corporations have found ways to make profits
that may not necessarily be to the benefit of the larger community.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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