Will these formats be extensible by third parties?
If Office 2003 can be updated to support these new formats, can
it also be updated to support the
OASIS standard? Obviously, the reciprocal question also
applies to OpenOffice.
The license terms are not specified; I hope they don’t
fall into the same trap that
SenderID did. Note that OpenOffice is
dual licensed
GPL/SISSL.
The Channel9 video is actually very high signal. Highlights:
* Schemas are still changing (and it’s implied that they will be provided)
* The formats are actually zipped directories of XML files and other resources, like embedded pictures. So, you can open the zip and replace the picture.
* I think he said the documents were arbitrarily extensible
* You can put your own documents in the bundle, and they will be accessible through the MSOffice object model. For example, a ride-along document could contain workflow information.
The really cool thing this would allow would be the ability to use standard diff tools (subversion, anyone?) on Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents. This will ma...
Looks like XSD schema will be plentiful and early (possibly even prior to the first beta). There was some indirect confirmation of the late next year target. Other than that, I didn’t hear any direct answers to the questions I posed above.
Also, slashdot has some commentary on the Patent License that Microsoft has used in the past. On a more positive note, apparently Eben Moglen took a look at that license, and said “I don’t think the alarm is justified”.
Using a zip file (like OOo) with images as separate zip entries is cool compared to Base64 in XML. (Now if only the Atom publishing protocol was POSTing zips of XHTML and images instead of Base64…)
Sam Ruby asks, “Will these formats be extensible by third parties?” I too am curious as to whether or not they’re extensible and what third party developers can ship in their products based on these formats.......
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Sam Ruby asks, “Will these formats be extensible by third parties?” I too am curious as to whether or not they’re extensible and what third party developers can ship in their products based on these formats.......
Yeah, I was the interviewer. Sorry, it was Friday afternoon and I was a bit suprised by what I was seeing. Didn’t quite expect the Office team to do this.
Thought Experiment on Office (Open and MS) formats
Tim Bray goes through a thought experiment on why we need, or rather don’t need, two open formats for Office documents. I’ve debated this issue with Sam Ruby before (Open Office Wars Pt. 6), but that was prior to ECMA. Microsoft’s...