(2003-02-28) Xml Publishers

XML recently "turned five". Some links:

• Edd Dumbill's retrospective

• xml-dev thread about the frustration of publishers with the lack of tools that meet their needs. Specifically, many tools require always keeping well-formed content at all times, rather than letting one focus on the content first and then clean it up later.

• Dorothea sums up the thread with her own perspective. I wish I could make these people sit down with real human editors for a month or so. There'd be a quantum leap in markup tools afterwards, I guarantee it.

• Kendall Grant Clark sums up as well, noting that Microsoft is actually the white knight here. This is scary, given how little they can be trusted to keep their XML consumable by others.

  • speaking of which, Jon Udell discussed MsOffice v11 last week. Word 11's Save As XML feature presents a check-box labeled "Save as data only." What data means, here, is tagged elements belonging to an XmlSchema. For a preexisting .doc file - a Status Report, a book chapter - there are no such elements. If you check "Save as data only," Word warns that you'll lose your document formatting. In this case, you'll lose more than that. The output will be an empty file because the document has no data in the XML sense. If you don't check that box, you get an ugly mess. So, is this just angle-bracketed RTF? Yes. Is it "real" XML? Also, yes.

  • Jon also says But as I mentioned in my column on InfoPath/XDocs, that application is aggressively standards-based, relying only on XSLT, CSS, DOM, and script. I'm particularly curious, now, to see how these two apps co-evolve. The XHTML editor built into InfoPath is something I've waited a long time for. While it's not the tool you'd use to write a 500-page report, most people don't do that very often - they write smaller chunks of text, mostly in email, which is where I'd really like to see that XHTML editor appear next. I'm inclined to think I'd rather see EMail (and short document) authoring happen either via OutLining/Structured Writing or Structured Text.