intertwingly

It is kinda cool to wake up to find comments from both Microsoft and OpenOffice on my blog.  I've followed the links provided by both Dare and Nick, and but this seems to only reinforce my earlier impressions.

It looks to me like the Open Office format is too closed, and the Microsoft Office 11 direction is too open.

Looking at the DTDs for Open Office, I see a well thought out set of definitions that build upon prior art like Dublin Core and SVG.  This is all goodness.  I may have missed it, but I don't see any provisions for additional user or tool specific elements.  Expect More.

Looking at how Office 11 will support XML, the sales pitch seems to me to be of the form "pick my browser because it supports Unicode".  That's nice, but does it fully support CSS level 2, a specific application of Unicode?  Ubiquitous higher level open and interoperable standards are important too.

FWIW, my recommendation to the OASIS TC is to define this standard using XML schema.  Feel free to support other schema standards, just make sure that you support the XML schema definition in a first class way.

Again, FWIW, my recommentation to the Microsoft Office team is to read and write documents that conform to the XSDs that will be defined by OASIS.  Feel free to support other schemas, just make sure that you support the OASIS defined schemas in a first class way.

All this is just my humble opinion.  I am not under any illusions that I have any real "pull" in either of these efforts.