Save-To-XML
Paul Prescod
paul at prescod.net
Sat Mar 20 00:00:40 GMT 1999
"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
>
> Ah, but if MS Word had a simple "Save-To-XML" option that let users save
> their documents using markup based on the styles they've built.
I was thinking about this last week. Someone could build this relatively
easily on top of the Office 2000 save as XML and the MSHTML DLL.
> Three
> times now, I've seen organizations that had done a lot of very good
> informal work with Word styles, and no easy path for those structures or
> the documents that use them to move to XML. I guess the incentive just
> isn't there for MS to make life easy. There are tools to do it, but it's
> still not much fun. (Another painful case of asymmetry.)
Even if the tool to do it was a "Save-To-XML" option it would still be not
much fun.
After all, the goal is not to get it into any-old-XML (that's easy) but to
get it into "our vocabulary". That's the harder part. There are tricky
problems about setting up division structure, converting tables to a
particular table model, cross-references to a particular linking model and
so forth. In the end it is a transformation job no matter how you slice
it. And even then you will likely have to do many manual fix-ups unless
the writers are Zen monks.
--
Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco
"Perpetually obsolescing and thus losing all data and programs every 10
years (the current pattern) is no way to run an information economy or
a civilization." - Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog
http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/10124.html
xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)
More information about the Xml-dev
mailing list