Office 2003 Pro as an XML Authoring Application?

Saqib Ali asks: "Office 2003 Pro as been out for quite some time now. I was wondering how many large corporations have been to able use it as a XML authoring / modelling application? I have been involved in evaluation of several XML authoring / modelling applications and am planning to evaluate Office 2003 for it's XML authoring capabilities. The scope of my evaluation is limited to capabilities required for authoring technical documentation, preferably in DocBook XML. Is there anything I should keep in mind before starting the evaluation? One feature that I like about Office 2003 is its support for WebDAV. Our homebrewed CMS (Content Management Systems) supports WebDAV, which makes publishing the content a breeze. Except for OpenOffice, I haven't seen any other XML authoring application that has support for WebDAV. Any suggestions?"

XML Spy

[kaisyain]

XML Spy supports web dav.

Re:question for the author

[GeckoX]

Can you explain exactly what the point of MetaData is?

If you can figure that out, I think you'll be able to extrapolate that to XML.

And if you really need an example, take this page you're viewing right now, copy the source to a text editor, remove all tags, save and load in your browser.

Yeah, I know, almost guaranteed to be trolling but ah well, maybe they're not.

licensing

[Insightfill]

Check the terms of the agreement if you wish to use their schema. License here [microsoft.com]

WebDAV in the OS so all apps...

[johnjones]

windows supports WebDAV (internet folders and such even with win98)
Apple Supports WebDav (OS X finder mounts them)
Linux Supports WebDAV (through FileSystem mounting)

so why is this a big deal ?

most Adobe products have WebDAV support there is that old stallwart FrameMaker and their high end versioning system is infact a WebDAV server based...

XML in terms of Docbook can be edited in all editors and some even have things to help you along like formating,preview,block level viewing and colour highlighting

try out xemacs (its pretty nice) or any good editor

john 'confused' jones

p.s. personally I would go with frammaker

Re:question for the author

[daviddennis]

You look at the stuff between the pointy brackets and use it as variable names and then you can do a name/value pair similar to what you get on a HTML form.

It's a lot easier to write and understand programs built that way than the "The account number is between columns 1 and 10 of the card; the customer's first name is between columns 11 and 40, ..."

I know because I've done both for EDI exchange and the former went a lot smoother than the latter.

D

Re:WebDAV in the OS so all apps...

[stonebeat.org]

> windows supports WebDAV (internet folders and such even with win98) Actually to be exact, it was the Internet Explorer that introduced the concept of Web Folders on Windows.

If you ever use Web Folder on Windows, you will quickly realize that the Application needs to support Web Folder/Web DAV as well, to be able to save to that Web Folder.

For e.g. open up Notepad/Wordpad and try to save to a Web Folder on Windows. You WON'T be able to do so. You can cut and paste files into a Web Folder, but that is not really streamlining the content publishing process.

It is almost imperative that the application in question also supports WebDAV.

There were rumors that Microsoft had planned to improve the WebFolder functionality on Windows XP. But that never happened. I guess MS wants the users to use native File Sharing technology rather than a more Open Standard protocol. Actually on Windows XP, they crippled WebDAV authentication if you are trying to connect to the Unix based Apache server. On XP you can only connect to a MS IIS based WebFolder.
Windows XP adds the domain context to the user credential when passing the credentials to a WebServer. Windows ISS server knows to ignore the domain context, but most of the other WebDAV server don't. To get around this you have to connect to a WebDAV share using I.E.

BXE

[Thalinor]

BXE [oscom.org] is an open source browser-based WYSIWYG XML editor with WebDAV support.

Re:question for the author

[Decaff]

Can you explain exactly what the point of XML is ?

XML is a standard way to mark up information. It is derived from SGML, but designed to be simple for people to read and for developers to write parsers for.

Before XML it was (and still is) common to devise specialised ASCII and binary formats which make no sense unless you have the documentation for the format.

An example I used to work with was chemical data, in which it was common to use position in a line to indicate meaning. In the middle of a large file you might find the line:

H 1.234 10.657 20.1234 902

What are the numbers? It may be sensible to assume they are co-ordinates, but what units? What is the number on the end?

A sensible markup will include information about meaning:

<atom><type>H</type><x unit="nm">1.234</x> etc.

This looks verbose, but is very amenable to compression.

Another important aspect to XML is extensibility. An XML document can have new tags added without breaking previously organised parsing.

XML may be verbose, and is often slow to parse, but its an excellent way for different software and organisations to exchange and store information in a documented format that won't lose meaning because it is a standard.