Fulfilling the Promise of XML-based Office Suites? 432
brentlaminack asks: "Almost a year ago Tim Bray of XML fame
said 'when the huge universe of MS Office documents becomes available for processing by any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence, all sorts of wonderful new things can be invented that you and I can't imagine.' Now that
MS has dropped the ball on the XML Office front, and
StarOffice has fulfilled its XML promise, where are all those 'wonderful new things?' Is anybody out there writing Perl/Java/whatever programs to take advantage of StarOffice XML? Could this be an opportunity for Free/Open/Libre software to leapfrog MS Office in real productivity as XML proponents have promised all along?" What kinds of new and wonderful things can you come up with?
XML... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:XML... (Score:5, Insightful)
-Feature overload (many features that users will never use)
-PCs are incredibly complex because they are so flexible and can do so many things.
-User interfaces are pretty poorly designed and don't seem to be getting any better.
-Humans don't "interface" well
If the mode of interacting with computers was like interacting with another person, they would be considerably easier to use. I often joke with my wife that *I* and the ultimate user interface. If you think about it, the best interface for the average user would be a very human-like avatar. Yes, this interface would suck for someone like me (a real computer user), but that's not who it would be targetted at.
Getting back to the XML subject, these same problems are what keep it from gaining any ground with the average user. The average user still doesn't "get" electronic documents. That's why they always resort to printing them out on paper. To be sure, there are times when a document SHOULD be printed on paper, but that's only really about 20% of the time. The other 80% a document is much better to keep in electronic format. With XML, so much the better. But if the average user has trouble understanding even a basic text file, the ultra-documents that XML can lead to will be completely bewildering. How do we solve this? I've argued this before over and over again: we need new input devices and now I will extend that to new output devices. If we had more variety with the output device, XML documents would be the next "great thing". The XML document has arrived too soon. If we had electronic paper that XML docs could be loaded into, there would be a revolution. It will happen, not just yet. And when it does happen, look for some big corporation to be backing something that looks a lot like XML, but it will have a different more friendly name and will be claimed as innovative.
The two stages we haven't reached yet (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent post is right on the money here.
Right now, I don't want flashy, XML-driven power apps. I'd settle for a word processor where I can produce my document with minimal fuss and good quality results. Apparently the vast majority of other word processor users agree with me, because I don't see any big uptake of ueber-powerful macro systems, manipulation tools based on super-flexible file formats, or any of the other much-promised stuff.
The simple truth is that usability is nowhere near the point where these facilities add value yet. Before you can develop powerful extra tools, you have to get the basics right:
These are essential for a serious document preparation system, yet no currently popular WP, commercial or free, even comes close to doing them all well. The serious people universally use either DTP packages or typesetting systems, and there's a reason for that.
When we reach the stage where a word processor can do these things well, without the user ignoring stylesheets because they're too awkward, having to look up the help every time they do a mail merge or finding that limitations in the document structure support prevent you doing what you want to at all in a non-trival document, then we'll be getting to the stage where more powerful "workflow" tools might be of real benefit.
The second stage, of course, is developing the tools to create those workflow tools, and making them sufficiently usable themselves that people actually take advantage of the advanced capabilities. Right now, we have some awesome-sounding automation tools available, but who really uses them? Not many people, IME. Much of the problem is that the automation tools themselves are, like the applications within which they live, simply too much effort to bother with.
Give me a usable basic WP and usable tools to automate it (XML-based or otherwise) and I will move the document creation world. Until then, don't call us...
Re:The two stages we haven't reached yet (Score:5, Interesting)
and yet we met with massive resistance from the other IT groups... "Why are you doing that, workflow does that" "that's a training issue (code phrase for 'the users are stupid') and "don't you know how to say no?" and (getting to your central point) "you've dumbed it down. Your application doesn't any of the powerful search, etc, features the workflow web interface has" (never mind NO ONE used these things).
I think it was a piece from Douglas Adams who told a story of someone he knew using word who wanted all the junk removed from Word's menus that he didn't use. He showed him how to remove menu items thru customization and he ended up with just Open, Save, Bold, Italic, Print and Spell check.
Re:The two stages we haven't reached yet (Score:3, Funny)
"I suppose the funny part was that he forgot "Close" ?
Nah, it's Word, it's got the automatic shutdown feature (otherwise known as crashing).
Re:The two stages we haven't reached yet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:XML... (Score:5, Insightful)
With XML documents, if the file format is well known, there will be filters for it. Major Office Suites will support well known file formats. If the file format is not as well known, but it is simple XML, there are high chances that smaller applications will also have filters for it.
I like to write web software and I was discouraged when I discovered that I could not find a Perl library to create OpenOffice.org files, so I created one of my own [sourceforge.net]. Granted it is not the best library, and is probably full of bugs, but it was easy to create and the research was painless. It does the job I made it for and I use it.
Compare that to the time when at work my boss asked me to take a Pick Basic binary datebase file and extract the data from it. I had to play around a while to figure out which bytes meant what and how to get the information out.
XML not only makes creation easy, but makes reverse engineering trivial. XML is not for the end users, it is for the developers why do not have the time to sit and read the 500 pages of the file format spec.
Re:XML... (Score:3, Insightful)
Here however is my super cool idea that I just came up with:
An open office server. If open offi
Re:XML... (Score:4, Informative)
There is a definite learning curve. You need to learn Uno.
IMHO, despite the learning, this would be way easier than trying to extract the parts of code you need from OOo and building a "converter" program. Maybe I say this because I have spent the time learning Uno and can now program OOo functionality from multiple languages, and how to integrate it into a web server like this seems obvious to me.
I have personally programmed OOo to do things from: OOo-Basic, Java, Python and MS Visual FoxPro. I know from postings from others that it is most definitely possible to use Delphi and VB.
Just as an example of what can be done, I built a Maze generator in java. You can run the maze generator on a different computer. Even a different OS. It connects to a running OOo, and then creates a multi page drawing of complex mazes. (You can get it at www.OOoMacros.org or at www.OOoExtras.org.)
Migrating file formats (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but you can't claim that an absence of metadata is due to a failure to write metadata: I myself used to keep a lot of metadata in my text processing documents and found that if you migrate periodically to new versions of the MS-Word format suite, you will periodically lose the metadata. No errors, no
Goldfarb's Conjecture (Score:3, Interesting)
The gigantic propaganda campaign about the "wonderful new things" that semantic markup would make possible was always just a masturbatory fantasy by people who'd never implemented anything, encouraged by SGML contractors who saw an opportunity to broaden their target market.
At the root of this delusion is what I call "Goldfarb's conjecture"-- the claim that document styles are superficial
Re:Goldfarb's Conjecture (Score:3, Insightful)
So, what have you implemented that's being used by thousands of businesses across the world? Pot. Kettle. Black, Mr failed AI expert.
Adding metadata to webpages is deceased. It has been for ov
standardization (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:standardization (Score:5, Informative)
Re:standardization (Score:2)
anything that will translate manager speak? (Score:5, Funny)
E.g., "We wish to engender a positive business atmosphere" => "Free beer at lunchtime"
Re:anything that will translate manager speak? (Score:4, Funny)
Not a script, but perhaps a free (as in beer) Word plugin? Bullfighter [dc.com]
Re:anything that will translate manager speak? (Score:5, Funny)
print "We're doing more layoffs and getting more bonuses.";
Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I'm taking a break right now from generating new Excel graphs by copying old ones and changing the source data, which isn't so bad, and those fucking error bars, which is. Oh, and the scatter plot points are superimposed so you can't click on the back ones.
So if I could do a find&replace on a flat file, I'd have been done an hour ago.
Other than that, no, I can't imagine either. VBA exists now and it's not like we're all flying around with wings and harps.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
imagine you write an outline in word. file -> export as -> presentation... or in access you select some rows and export to a spreadsheet. this is where staroffice stands to beat them.
but MS Office derives its profitability from incompatibility -- you have to use their products to get full use of their file format. so using MS Office will necessarily sacrifice this functionality.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is what Office does (rather) well. Use an xls as a data source for an MDB, a word doc, and a presentation, all at the same time. Or link database info to a remote presentation.
And while Office prefers Office, you CAN link to and from bare text files. Whether delimited or fixed length.
Way back with Office95 we were
Here's why your wrong (Score:3, Informative)
You people are so biased. Now Office has suddenly "dropped the ball." Of course, that meme will permeate through all Slashbots' thinking, whether or not they've even tried Office 2003.
Here is a sample XML file. The original message said "This is a <b>test
Nope (Score:2)
Seriously though, koffice will use the exact same fileformat as staroffice. Is that wonderful enough for you ?
Not a big innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
This is just a return to part of what made Unix so powerful in the first place: text formats that can be manipulated by the whole suite of command line tools. "Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to re-invent it, poorly" (Henry Spencer).
Back in the 70s we used nroff/troff for document formatting, producing in some cases professional-quality camera-ready books...but the source code was easily fed to spell checkers, formatting-command-strippers, sort, wc, etc etc etc.
XML is ok...not bad as a meta-format...but it's not some kind of new magic; it's just more of the same as what we always used to do.
The great step forward is moving away from the crud that happened in the middle: proprietary underdocumented binary formats that couldn't be fed to filter pipelines.
In this case, moving backwards is progress. But expecting something amazing to be invented is a bit much; it was already invented a long time ago.
P.S. pet peeve...people credit Knuth (admittedly an amazing guy for the Art of Computer Programming) for reinventing typesetting with TeX. Now, TeX is nicer than nroff/troff in multiple ways, but it's worse in some others (TeX is not set up for command line filters!), and in any case is only an incremental improvement, not a revolution over the older Unix tools. Credit is not properly being given.
Re:Not a big innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
I see your point. But have you tried doing mathematical formulas in groff? In (La)TeX they're a breeze (relative to just about everything else out there). Right tools for the right job I guess.
Re:Not a big innovation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not a big innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
And you blew it, Grasshopper.
The lesson was, "The right tool for the job."
Sometimes the right tool, despite all the modern technolgical advances, is still a rock.
KFG
Re:Not a big innovation (Score:5, Funny)
When all you have is a rock, everything looks like Bill Gates' head.
OMFG someone with sense (Score:5, Funny)
-----
You want to make your way in the CS field? Simple. Calculate rough time of
amnesia (hell, 10 years is plenty, probably 10 months is plenty), go to
the dusty archives, dig out something fun, and go for it.
It's worked for many people, and it can work for you.
----
if you must [google.com]
So get ready for all the gee whizzery now the new kids have "found" plain text.
Re:Not a big innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
TeX is god [ok maybe not $DIETY god , but fairly high up there]
TeX , along with latex , allows me to do wonderful things with documents generating into multiple formats. Although I have had some eps integration problems (who knew plot utils used some funky ass default font that know one has ever heard of before) it was my fault for not checking to make sure that I had the right fonts installed. TeX is wonderful for typesetting , it puts the control back in the user .
Missing some of the points (Score:3, Informative)
The strength is in the meta-data. By using XML the doc can be formatted by anything that can understand it. But formatting is not the point.
The docs can then be referenced in a relational database - searched,indexed & importantly shared and migrated to other indexing systems or stripped.
The XML 'magic' is very simple. The use of the data is whatever you want it to be. Do you want to restrict access, provide access, record access, implement version control and X-r
Re:Missing some of the points (Score:3, Interesting)
True! But it is widely under-appreciated that this can and was done even with troff, and still is today in an important way: the "apropos" command that scans for relevant man pages works by looking at a DB built by searching for semantic tags in the man pages.
This very handy feature would not be possible if troff just did presentation style.
It's true that this is not the main emphasis of troff, and that one is at the mercy of w
MS Office is required (Score:3, Insightful)
At this point in time, there's no reason to switch from Microsoft Office to another office suite simply because this new suite uses XML. XML is best suited as a tool for the back-end developer, not an excuse to migrate to a product that has so many rough edges in its current form.
Agreed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MS Office is required (Score:2)
StarOffice is.
Re:MS Office is required (Score:4, Funny)
The answer, my friends, is an integrated E-mail/Calendar suite. Integrated right into OpenOffice. This is what will finally drive a stake through Microsoft's undead heart.
Integrated E-mail. Integrated Calendaring. Right in the office suite. All integrated and everything. You all know you want it. Now go, my toiling minions! Build! Build, I say!
Re:Users Expect ... (Score:3, Interesting)
To create a new document users would first be presented with a DE screen asking for some meta-data (perhaps with some manditory fields) before being dropped into the more familiar wordprocessor gui.
Someone with admin rights to the document management system might define the fields that go into the initial DE screen.
Users might have to choose beforehand whether the document will be emailed, faxed or printed (eg for s
Re:MS Office is required (Score:3, Insightful)
Apache module (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Apache module (Score:2)
PHP Script that generated reports (Score:5, Interesting)
Was really easy, StarOffice documents are zipped files that contain the XML files. I just unzip'ed the file, inserted the appropriate data into the content.xml file and zipped it back up.
I was absolutely amazed by how easy the StarOffice files were to work with. I'm really excited about the possibilities that are in store for us, especially ones that are better than my little hack.
Brandon Petersen
Re:PHP Script that generated reports (Score:2, Interesting)
(would be great for certain automated server applications where there is no display, etc, and running StarOffice isn't an option because you want it automated)
xml - pdf (Score:3, Interesting)
That probably sounds icky and scary, but should not be all that hard.
I don't know what the formats are, but there's a whole pile of flexibility in XSL and FOP so building a very accurate version could take some fiddling. But producing a close approximation is probably very straightforward.
Yes, Standardised Financial Reports (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine a world where any finacial (excel based or otherwise) report from any public company can be compared with any other company report and we can all be sure of how the figures were calculated and what they mean.
AND they are fully comparable. And fully importable into any financial package. No longer is any one company dependant on one financial package. Come to think of it there is no way the vendors of such products will ever allow this to happen!!!
http://www.xbrl.org/
jech
Command line rendering (Score:5, Interesting)
It's called troff (Score:3, Informative)
then there was postscript
now XML
whee, I have candyfloss in my hair
Reporting is a great use of OOo's XML format. (Score:5, Interesting)
Difficult (Score:2, Interesting)
It took some time to get up to speed, as the compressed XML is split across four different files (content, meta data, settings and styles). Mostly, I was concerned with modifying the content document.
Each of the documents is written with space in mind, and for the document I was dealing with, the content was 20K on a single line. I had t
True WYSIWYG HTML editor (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, OpenOffice 1.1 already comes with a nice HTML tool, but that doesn't stop anyone from trying to do better.
Re:True WYSIWYG HTML editor (Score:3, Interesting)
The guys at Typo3 have done exactly this. They write an extension that takes a normal Office 2003 XML document (like this one [typo3.org]) and displays it as normal HTML (like this [typo3.org]). The resulting HTML is subject to the same rules as all of the other HTML produced by Typo3, which means the appearance of everything can still be changed by modifying a template.
Typo3 has always been featur
Automatic Generation of Pretty Reports (Score:5, Interesting)
I bring it up because my organization paid Crystal reports $10,000 to be able to do this. If I could have written a little perl script that connects to the database and emits an OpenOffice doc, then I could have saved the organization ten thousand dollars, and saved myself a world of pain. (The only thing more evil than Crystal Reports is crystal meth.)
You might be wondering why I wouldn't just use HTML and some library that automatically creates chart PNG images -- the reason is we have to email the report to our board members because they're demanding like that. So we use Crystal to generate pretty PDFs with all the charts. We also let the board members log into our system to generate their own reports via the web, which they can then email to the group.
So having an XML-based document format for this would be wonderful, especially if OpenOffice would provide a command-line utility for converting from OO format to PDF.
Re:Automatic Generation of Pretty Reports (Score:2)
Re:Automatic Generation of Pretty Reports (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Automatic Generation of Pretty Reports (Score:5, Funny)
Funny you should mention that... I'm at work right now (10:00 PM local time; been here since 9:00 AM) for that very reason! And I'll give you a hint, I've never touched crystal meth
Re:Automatic Generation of Pretty Reports (Score:3, Interesting)
I made use of "Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Software" O'Reilly Book and some extra research on the Web. It was mostly a pretty print of lots of HTML tables as PDF's + text.
Some customers demanded Word doc
Well, I would be... (Score:2)
Jedidiah.
XML (Score:2)
SOMEONE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD give me a list of XML sites so I can actually finish my app that uses it (hence the "it's still beta" in my sig for about 2 years now)
later
Word to RTF to XML to HTML (Score:5, Interesting)
At my company, once a failed startup with new life under the wings of a huge corporate parent, we have been using a homebrewed Web publishing system that takes Word 2000 or XP documents, saves them in RTF format, then uses a utility created by Majix [tetrasix.com] to transform the document to XML. From there we use perl, and some XSL to get the document into XHTML combined with some JSP to produce documents that we deploy on our production env. The good part: the system was entirely free of license fees (other than office and Windows of course). The bad: it was a pain in the behind to get all the parts together.
The steps to produce valid XML from Word are the biggest hack I have ever been a part of as an engineer. We had to write a custom VB DLL we run inside (what else) an IIS server which takes the documents uploaded by authors, then saves the documents as RTF. Control is then handed over to Tomcat, which takes the RTF and uses some custom classes that make Majix a server to transform the documents into XML. All in all we had to use VB, VBA, Java, JSP; two separate server configurations (IIS and Tomcat) and a bunch of really ugly glue to stich all the parts together.
I for one, and I am sure I speak for my entire team, would love a solution which saves us this ugly cludge.
Re:Word to RTF to XML to HTML (Score:2)
Re:Word to HTML to XML to HTML (Score:3, Informative)
I find the easiest way of getting usable XML out of Word is you use Word's save as HTML function and then running W3C TidyLib [sf.net] to get rid of all (most) of the M$ crap.
This leaves you with a HTML-esq document that you can feed to an XSL:T and get whatever XML you need.
I did consider using OO to open the Word document and to save them as XML however I had trouble with its API (I also had trouble with automating Word but here I had plenty of biter experience to draw on.).
The more things change... (Score:2)
BTM
Re:The more things change... (Score:2, Insightful)
Two Things... (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft did not drop the ball with XML. Microsoft disappointed the slashdot crowd by not going completely open... geee...... big shock there. Microsoft maintains dominance to their office suite by controlling the file formats behind it. Opening that up, without reason would be absolutely stupid from a business point of view. Granted, its an un-popular stance, but that doesnt make it any less true. MS played along with the XML game to be able to use XML as a buzz word... and in some ways, they truly have embraced XML... just not in their holy cash cow called Office. Take a look at Visual Studio (dot) Net, and you will see how strongly MS has infact embraced XML.
Secondly...
XML is perhaps one of the most over hyped technologies ever. Self describing datatypes are nothing new. The only really remarkable thing about XML is how embraced by the industry it was. In all honesty... the difference between XML and CSV files really isnt that signifigant. Granted... XML is far beyond anything a CSV ever did, but they all present the same result. In the current work environment I am in, all our enterprise systesm support input/output now via CSV. In addition, im in the auto industry, so the whole hype of Webservices+XML really isnt that special either. RIght now, they have ANX and EDI... granted... XML + Web Services would be much more straight forward... but in 20+ years of evolution... has it really come that far?
Sorry for the anti-status-quo opinion, but I cant help but believe that XML is way overhyped. Useful... sure... but definatly overhyped!
Re:Two Things... (Score:5, Insightful)
CSV? LOL.
Does CSV have a transformation language (XSLT)?
Does CSV have an easy to use parser & object model (SAX, DOM)?
Does CSV have an in document addressing language (XPATH)?
Does CSV have a standard way of supporting hierarchical data?
Just cause you think it's overhyped doesn't mean it isn't worth every bit of that hype. I've been using XML since 1998. I shudder when I think about the pre-XML days.
Re:Two Things... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now... the thing is, many of the things you have mentioned are already expressed by Relational databases, which is generally what the CSV file is generated from in a batch based system. In alot of ways, that stuff already existed... just not in the file format, but in the process of creating said file format!
Dont get me wrong, im not saying that XML is shitty... im just
Re:Two Things... (Score:3, Insightful)
Does XML really grant us that much beyond what CSV and good databases behind the scenes really help that much???
Yes because XML fits in places where databases aren't even worth considering. If you think XML is a replacement for relational databases then you're a bit lost IMO.
How many generic CSV parsers are there? Are the fields (tabs?) self describing?
Think of an OS and applications today and the various files they use. Think of configuration files, shortcut files, bookmark files, document files,
It's all about the parsers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, the real revolution was in creating standardized parsers. I spent many an hour with LEXX and YACC churning out parsers for many custom file formats. Even though XML may not seem the most efficient way to represent things, it's great not to have to write a new parser every time we have a new bit of information to represent in a file. It frees you to think about what data you want in a file instead of directing your file contents to things that will be easy to parse.
That's why XML is every bit as valuable as it is made out to be, just not for the reasons usually given...
Ease of XML Document Formats (Score:5, Interesting)
I wrote a song lyric storage system using PHP and MySQL, and I had the idea to have it be able to be put onto a slideshow to teach it to a group of people (or whatever). With the XML format provided by OpenOffice.org, I was able to quickly put it together and show it off, impressing quite a few people in the process. Of course, those people think Word/PowerPoint run the world, and the file format is all but a mystery to them. Hence having something generated on the fly via a webpage has its cool factor, and not to mention it was a good chance to introduce this free word processing suite to them. Also a good chance to tell them that if I were to rely on ASP/PowerPoint it would have costed much, much more.
Open document format is the way to go in the future, because it definitely allows interoperability.
Re:Ease of XML Document Formats (Score:2)
One thing that everyone seems to forget ( or is un-aware of... ) is that Microsoft provides API's for the creation of Office documents via code or script aswell. In the past, due to the bean-counters dependance on Excel sprea
Re:Ease of XML Document Formats (Score:2)
Re:Ease of XML Document Formats (Score:2)
Hey... personally I hate excel itself, but then again, im not a bean counter. But, meeting customer requirements is perhaps the most important thing you do. As an analyst... its your job to contrast proper solutions vs customer requ
Re:Ease of XML Document Formats (Score:2)
If the origional poster was talking about development costs... I would love to see numbers to back that up. I hate to say it, but for the most par
Re:"cost", not "costed" (Score:3, Insightful)
Web-Document Templates; Charts; Presentations... (Score:2, Insightful)
few off the top of my head:
online services generating template documents; such as online re
Is it just me... (Score:4, Funny)
I mean, come on. It's just a standardised file format. That's all it is, OK?
XSLT Stylesheets (Score:2)
Re:XSLT Stylesheets (Score:2)
You must manage, force use of limited metadata (Score:5, Interesting)
Our solution was a tcl front end that forced the entry of a minimal amount of metadata *during file creation,* to be picked from preset categories and subcategories. We also provided for free text entry but that was to be used only after the other fields.
The points are
a) The general metadata categories were known; the engineering tasks weren't new.
b) No one is going to go back after the fact and enter the metadata. You have to integrate its entry into the new file work procedure.
c) It's got to be as easy as file/new in a GUI.
d) Its utility has got to be very very apparent when juxtaposed with a subdirectory / filename scheme.
Microsoft Dropped the Ball? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not me but I am writing C# apps that make use of Excel's XML format. I wrote about using XSLT on the Excel XMLSS format in my blog [kuro5hin.org] a few months ago when I had to update date values in certain columns. I also posted the XSLT stylesheet.
Disclaimer: I work on the XML team at Microsoft but not directly with Microsoft Office.
Re:Microsoft Dropped the Ball? (Score:4, Informative)
Yup, peeople are (Score:4, Informative)
XML and MS Office (Score:3, Informative)
I guess there's XML and there's XML and getting between them is not necessarily easy.
Microsoft made a big deal about the most recent versions of Office writing out XML, but that was because XML was a buzzword, sounded as if it might be more open than ".doc", and was essentially a selling point.
From what I've read, people have been underwhelmed [com.com] with the XML coming out.
If only a similar set of transformations could be developed for OpenOffice to import and export the XML of the latest version of Microsoft Office. From what I understand, the schema is not documented and the formatting and rendering rules for documents are still kept a private affair, just as it has been for .doc files.
You're still locked-in, dude!
That quote only works for MS Office (Score:2)
And it would pan out, too, if MS didn't drop the ball.
If MS didn't drop the ball, we'd have offices full of non-IT people creating XML documents without realizing it. A mass of structured data would build and become grist for the mill that is the office geek.
Unless OpenOffice/StarOffice has some huge market share that I'm not aware of, I'm not expecting to see any remarkable perl scripts for parsing office docs soon.
Docbook XML OOo Filters (Score:3, Interesting)
They work pretty well (if you can manage to get them installed with the broken install instructions) but only for a limited subset of Docbook. There's no support for the programlisting tag, and lists are currently broken.
If anyone out there has superior XSLT kung fu, getting those two things working would be most appreciated : )
(I know the basics, but I don't yet have time at work to justify it. Maybe if this project gets done on time...)
It's the presentation, not the format (Score:2)
Office Automation (Score:4, Interesting)
If you wanna give them a try sometime, assuming you got Windows, VB5+, and Office installed... just add Office to your references (try Microsoft Office in the Project References menu) and give it a whorl. It's fairly easy to program in if you've used Office... most of the concepts that make for a good Office user translate directly into programming concepts for the Office object model.
And yet Office Automation programmers are in scarce supply.
Microsoft even offers a cert specifically for Office Automation programmers!
But I haven't seen too many well written Office applications. My speculation is that its not for lack of tools, but that its for lack of concepts. Other than the obvious reporting needs that any large organization has, are there any compelling reasons to spend an afternoon coding an office application?
I think it is this lack of compelling reasons, and not a lack of easy-to-use programming tools that causes the lack of good free open add-ins...
Actually, WordPerfect has supported XML for years (Score:2, Interesting)
Putting the cart before the horse... (Score:4, Insightful)
For most of the office document world (at least the world I work with regularly), most documents are unique in both structure and content and I as a programmer can make only the most basic of assumptions regarding what a program can expect to find within the content bundle. Sure the XML gives me a nice set of rules to rely on for breaking the document into parts and reading it in. But it doesn't do a whole lot to ensure that, say, two spreadsheets follow similar content assignment conventions. Most places can't get two managers to agree on the form and structure of a basic memo, or even get the same individual to repeatedly use a consistent structure in all his/her business communications.
Most organizations need to work on a few things before this type of processing will be useful in the large. Two particular areas would be: a) consistent use of metadata within document definitions to facilitate querying and filtering, and b) more sophisticated use of template functionality beyond just ensuring every page has the same graphic in it's header.
Assumption (Score:3, Interesting)
Word has two different modes. One is where you can save an ordinary word document in an XML format. This is the one
InfoPath simply rocks. Where else can you create a end user friendly UI that outputs clean XML (with XHTML islands if you choose) and will submit directly into a web service & make the whole thing start to end in a few minutes (for a simple form, of course).
I just don't get it. Seems like mindless MS bashing to me.
Structure Structure Structure (Score:3, Interesting)
The better part is when you can structure your document. Not just a heading surrounding a bunch o' paragraphs, but a (to use the stuff I have to work with) Research Report contains a Title Page, a Synopsis, an Introduction, Materials Section, etc. You can't put tables and figures on the title page or Introduction, you can in the Synopsis and Materials Section. TOCs and things like that are created as part of rendition, between the Synopsis and Introduction, without the user messing with it.
Now even more than storing those sections (which would, in the HTML world, be DIVs and SPANs), I want control over the UI: disable that table button in the title page, even down to where bold and italics can be used.
Office 2003 has some facility to implement this, but it's kind of awkward -- it's an extension of how their SmartTags work. Generally pretty ugly, to control everything.
I don't want to use an XML editor, my users know Word, are used to Word Processors, and they cost 1/5 of XML editors, less in bulk licenses.
I'd be implementing this now, if it weren't for two things: a) I work for a big corporation that never buys into new releases for a couple of years, and 2) they're laying me off -- closing all the facilities in Chicago (sigh).
XSLT (Score:3, Insightful)
extract the content from an
OpenOffice text document, as
well as a presentation, and feed them
into other tools. This without
trying to read any DTD's. Applying
more effort would have yielded more
functionality, but I was in a hurry,
just trying to get some information
out with some heirarchy to it.
Now, extracting the style is a different
challenge, and of course style
means different things to different
people. But it is simply madness to try
to extract content from Word
and Powerpoint files for use elsewhere.
Oh yes, I used Saxon. Nice product.
I'm doing it right now (Score:3, Interesting)
> take advantage of StarOffice XML?
Yes, actually I started doing that yesterday: I'm using Perl and XSLT to build documents in StarOffice XML (or actually OpenOffice.org XML), converting some 500 XHTML pages into one huge OpenOffice.org document. It's amazingly easy!
Re:Forget it.... (Score:2)
Bullshit - I use OO all the time at home. (Score:2)
Re:The wonderful things (Score:2)
Sorry, I didn't mean to be so darn vicious, but that just ticked me off for some reason. Your comment is both untrue and inflamatory, and its like your are beating on a baby. Pick on somebody your own size. OO is spanky new and generally used only at home except in the rare enlightened companies which never caved in to MS strong-arm tactics and still run Unix or the like.
OO is better than MS Office and it always will be. Any gift given out of charity is much more meaningful than a
Searching for files with *.sxw in the name... (Score:2)
I should say we have.
Linden Hall School converted completely to OOo and StarOffice two years ago and haven't looked back since.
Maybe you should consider your rising taxes and the cost of MS product before blindly recommending our schools continue using it, eh?
Re:MS isn't the only one with a proprietary format (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe because its not a closed format, hence all the open-source pdf generation programs.
Frankly, I'd rather see more PDF generation than XML. If I sit down and spend hours designing a book or report it's more important to know that it will appear as designed than that it can be converted into a mass of raw data and presented in any half-arsed way by someone so primative that they still think PowerPoint is a pretty good idea.
TWW