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Microsoft Technology

Office 2003 Pro as an XML Authoring Application? 41

Posted by Cliff from the state-your-opinions dept.
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?"
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Office 2003 Pro as an XML Authoring Application? More

Office 2003 Pro as an XML Authoring Application?

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  • XML Spy (Score:2, Informative)

    by kaisyain ( 15013 )
    XML Spy supports web dav.

  • XML Mind (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Plake ( 568139 )
    XMLMind [xmlmind.com] works with WebDAV and is great for DocBook. We use it for all of our documentation.
  • I thought windows had 'Web Folders', which was WebDAV access? If you can switch OS's, KDE's kioslaves almost certainly support it. I can't check at the moment though..

    • I can verify that - I've used KDE's webdav:// and webdavs:// ioslaves to access "folders" on a Microsoft(r) Exchange(r) server before.

      The reason I'd hesistate and look long and hard at an MS project for this is standards support. MS's WebDAV/"Web Folders" support appears to have a number of quirks (what a surprise), so it MAY not interoperate properly with anything else. (Someone else has already mentioned the licensing concerns over using MS's schema as well).

      (I actually submitted an "Ask Slashdot" yes

      • Here [microsoft.com] is an interesting page from MS about how WebDAV works.
        Apparently, any app in XP can use WebDAV since it has been added as a new filesystem driver (mrxdav.sys).

  • licensing (Score:3, Informative)

    by Insightfill ( 554828 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @12:44PM (#9760856) Homepage
    Check the terms of the agreement if you wish to use their schema. License here [microsoft.com]

    • Re:licensing (Score:3, Insightful)

      by stonebeat.org ( 562495 )
      Actually I DONT want to use microsoft's schema. It has too many licensing restrictions.

      I want to use DocBook schema instead. DocBook schema is much better, and has a open license.

  • XMLMind (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ChaseTec ( 447725 ) <chase@osdev.org> on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @12:56PM (#9761015) Homepage
    I'm using XMLMind's XML Editor [xmlmind.com]. I just took over the tldp.org's Enterprise Java on Linux Howto and I didn't have any experience with docbook and it's been fairly easy with XMLMind. It's sort of a WYSIWYG editor for docbook and it will do transformation to html. There is a free version but if you buy it then you get webdav support. I was going to buy it since I like the free version so much but it's a little pricey for me but since we're comparing it to Office here...Oh, and it's Java based so it'll run anywhere.

    • I use XMLMind's software... It's great for the techinical documentation. Great for docbook in general. However, the pdf and html generation plugins require you to use the pay version. It isn't a big deal for me since I'll use the open source docbook to pdf tools... But can be for those that don't have that available to them.

  • WebDAV in the OS so all apps... (Score:3, Informative)

    by johnjones ( 14274 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @02:01PM (#9761685) Homepage Journal
    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
    • > 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 t
  • You must be out of your mind. Get gvim 6 installed onto your XP box and be happy. If you insist on spending money, use XMLSpy.

  • Not the same, but close? Jedit is a text editor, but it has extensions that can do the XSLT xforms internally, as well as structure browsers and tag completion. OpenOffice is probably what you want because it has built-in filters to export to DocBook. You can also add your own export filters to xform to whatever schema you want.
  • I write/publish our technical documents using the reStructured Text markup conventions. These are processed by Docutils to XML. The XML is handled by Saxon and an XSL:FO transformation. The XML:FO is then rendered to PDF using XEP.

    The documents are CVSed, so that I can claw back time and so that I can have multiple authors without too much worry about them stomping all over one anothers' work; and the publishing system is run automatically every night.

    The advantages are significant: reST is easy to rea

  • BXE (Score:3, Informative)

    by Thalinor ( 4731 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @07:43PM (#9765259) Homepage
    BXE [oscom.org] is an open source browser-based WYSIWYG XML editor with WebDAV support.
  • the format is like:

    <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
    <datafile type='MSWord'> _LOTS_(&**(&_OF_(*&D)(*SDLKJ(*&(*&_BINARY_(*&SD(*& *(&SD_DATA
    </datafile>
  • Is there anything I should keep in mind before starting the evaluation?

    Yes. Office 2003 Pro's XML export is exactly that - an export. According to Microsoft, certain information in .doc and .xls files can't be represented in the XML format and will be lost when exporting.

    OpenOffice uses XML as its native format, and does not suffer data loss when using XML. If someone hands you an existing .doc or .xls, you could better preserve its content by using Openoffice than MS Office.
  • If your XML is gonna be translated with XSLT, then hands down the best XML/XSLT editor to use is Xselerator

    http://www.topxml.com/xselerator/default.asp

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