brentlaminack's Journal: XML in Office Suite Recap

OK, yesterday I asked slashdot about the much-touted benefits of using XML in an office suite. See the story. The XML proponent said that the ability to look through documents with a perl script would do wonderful things. I asked has it?

The results:

The largest group was probably the naysayers. "XML is overrated", "Office Suites don't need XML", "Structured text is as old as Nroff/TeX/WordStar/whatever" This group largely missed the concept of "open standard" and "multiple tools".

There were some MS folk that said MS hasn't dropped the ball in XML, MS office does wonderful XML. Just use their tools and see how wonderful it works. I guess they missed the part about XML being open. Yes, MS office documents work with MS tools. That's not the point. Do they work with other tools? Is a word document really all XML? No. Several cited creating InfoPath documents with the MS tools and said they were wonderful. What's InfoPath? A MS client that seems to take the place of a browser. So instead of building web-centric applications as is smart, an organization would build InfoPath applications that lock them into MicroSoft. Yes, it reads XML but is a proprietary client.

Those that were actually using XML with Office were mostly doing it the other way around: using database and programming languages to GENERATE XML-based Office documents. Example: letting users format reports as they want, then using the user-generated file as a template for the program to fill with the actual data.

Has XML-based Office Programs lived up to the ballyhoo? No. Not yet. One poster said to ask again in about three years. Probably a good idea.