XML and (K)Office

[David Megginson]

Now that the press is (prematurely) declaring Microsoft's imminent
demise [1], perhaps we can stop worrying about MS Office's XML support
(why hitch your cart to an allegedly dying horse?) and look at Linux.

For those of you who don't know, the current incarnation of the
emacs/vi or sh/csh religious battle (or perhaps SGML/XML) in the Linux
world is KDE vs. Gnome as the desktop manager.  I'm in the Gnome camp,
so it is with mixed feelings that I draw attention to the fact that
KOffice for KDE (see article [2]) uses XML-based save formats for
*all* of its applications (word processor, spreadsheet, formula
designer, presentation manager, etc. etc.).

To be fair, the main Gnome spreadsheet also uses a (no doubt
incompatible) XML-based save format.

There's also a hot rumour [3] that Microsoft has assigned 37
programmers to work on a Linux port of MS Office.

The place to go for this kind of stuff is slashdot.org, which is heavy 
on the hacker look-and-feel.


All the best,


David

[1] http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9903/24/mslinux.html/ (and many
    others) 
[2] http://www.mieterra.com/article/koffice.html
[3] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/cp-19.03.99-000/ (auf Deutsch)

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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