Word and XML (was: XML standards coherency and so forth)

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Thu, 21 Jan 1999 20:20:20 +0000, Sean Mc Grath <digitome at iol.ie> wrote:

>RTF doesn't map well to XML -- even very low level -- formatting
>oriented XML -- because of the way RTF is structured.
>
>It is stack based and allows structures to overlap:-
>
> \b1 bold \i1 bold italic \b0 italic \i0 plain

It depends on the RTF implementation.  You are correct about
"stack based", but that's actually contradictory to the
example given.  Word (7/95) really writes this:

  {\b bold }{\b\i bold italic }{\i italic }plain

for that sequence.  In fact, it gets a bit fanatical about
using braces, even if the \b0 method would save bytes.  So 
properly-nested XML would seem *more* likely, as it would be 
the no-brainer conversion from the RTF!  I conclude that the 
XML generator is not based on the RTF-producing code... or
on the underlying Word format, which is similar in design.

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  (jeremy at omsys.com)  http://www.omsys.com/

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