Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Office Suite Markup: Is It Worthwhile

Patrick Durusau - Paper

He is the Editor of ODF....so I imagine he thinks it is worthwhile.

Open Office Allows:
  • We are interested in explicit semantics. But users just want to get things done.
  • Interchange
  • Application Independence
  • Long term preservation of content
Server pack 2 for Office 2007 will have native ODF support

Lots of argument with his conclusions that everyone making their own XML is a good thing. My computer crashed (damn Windows) so I am behind on the conversation. Liam and Tommie had some great back-n-forth with Patrick.

ODF tags are presentational? Patrick says they aren't all presentational but isn't specific about it. Sounds like most of the tags are presentational...which is not how I recall XML being used to its full potential.

Wendell: "What you left out is that these formats are REALLY ugly."

This talk brought up a lot of discussion but I think it can be mostly narrowed down to:
  1. How does this help me as an XML developer?
  2. Microsoft Office is pervasive...it is going to be difficult to get through that?

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