David Strom: Microsoft's XML is More Than Just Standards

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

I found this a very interesting and pretty important discussion
of MS-XML, and its potential for embracing and then extending
web publishing standards.   Jamie Love <love@cptech.org>



http://webreview.com/wr/pub/1999/04/02/edge/index.html

Microsoft's XML is More Than Just Standards

by David Strom
Apr. 2, 1999


  [snip]

The real news is how MS-XML is designed from the start to be the common
file interchange format for all Microsoft Office 2000 applications. In
doing this, Microsoft has taken to extreme its time-honored practice of 
embracing and extending an ongoing standards effort. This time, MS-XML 
has something other than XML in mind. Microsoft is trying to move 
people away from ordinary HTML 3.0 documents and make Office 2000 the 
standard tool for Web authoring. And while earlier efforts, FrontPage 
most memorable, haven't really caught on, I think this time Office 2000 
has a solid chance.


[snip]

While this isn't a review of the product, let me touch on one other
feature in Word 2000 that makes it easier for web authors. When you 
go to save your document, you can save it directly to your web site 
via FTP. Once you enter the URL, username, and password, the FTP site 
appears on your local directory tree as just another location.

But the side effect is that I have to make a pact with the devil. Once I
go down the route of saving my pages as MS-XML, the naked code may
become
unreadable to me. The pages also take up more room and thus will take a
bit longer to download and view. As I said, I am not a XML programmer. I
have purposely kept my web pages sparse and relatively devoid of 
"advanced" features in the name of being browser agnostic and
universally 
viewed. I fear that the more people use Word 2000, the more MS-XML will 
replace ordinary HTML code on the Web.

  [snip]


If you buy into my explanation, the whole idea of suing Microsoft for
putting IE into the operating system becomes really a minor sideshow. 
With Office 2000, something bigger is at stake: to capture all the 
current non-MS Office users, those few hardy holdouts who use Lotus 
and Corel tools to create their documents, spreadsheets, and 
presentations.

And while they are at it, Microsoft also wants to capture those others
who use non-MS tools for writing web pages. The underlying effort is to
be the single document interchange vendor for everyone, even those folks 
who don't run some form of Windows on their desktop. And MS-XML will be 
the Trojan Horse to pull this off. Taken in this context, whether 
Microsoft supports or doesn't support the overall XML standards effort 
isn't that important anymore. Because soon more people will be writing 
MS-XML documents than anything else, and then MS-XML will become the 
standard.



-- 
James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology
I can be reached at love@cptech.org, by telephone 202.387.8030,
by fax at 202.234.5176. CPT web page is http://www.cptech.org