MS Office XML Format Now In TextEdit

computerdude33 writes "Apparently, Apple heard of Microsoft Office changing to XML formats. If you have OS X 10.4.2, you can save documents in TextEdit in Word XML Format. They are saved with a *.xml extension, and are riddled with references to Word. Here is an example of one of these documents."

Re:Who is maintaining the "standard"?

[mroch]

OpenDocument [oasis-open.org] from OASIS

Re:Who is maintaining the "standard"?

[tsa]

Don't forget that in the days before IE, Netscape was the market leader and they defined the standard. Nobody cared about that then.

Re:Beating MS... at their own game.

[sycotic]

I get the same thing in Microsoft Office Word 2003 :\

Re:OO.Org

[EddWo]

OpenOffice 2.0 Beta already supports WordML.
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3 3450

Re:Holy Riddler, Batman!

[hawaiian717]

Yes, w: at the start of the XML tag indicates that the tag is part of a namespace, which would be defined somewhere in the file by adding an xmlns attribute to a tag.  In this case, it's in the w:wordDocument tag, and in fact several namespaces are defined:

<w:wordDocument xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/ 2003/2/wordml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:w10="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:SL="http://schemas.microsoft.com/schemaLibra ry/2003/2/core" xmlns:aml="http://schemas.microsoft.com/aml/2001/c ore" xmlns:wx="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word /2003/2/auxHint" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C1488 2" xmlns:st1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smartt ags" xml:space="preserve">

Re:that's gotta be the worst XML ever

[hawaiian717]

For some reason Firefox is hiding the standard xml header and the xmlns declaration. Just save the file to disk and open it in your favorite text editor, and you'll see it's there.

Word XML not necessarily a voluntary move...

[soullessbastard]

Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a NeoOffice [neooffice.org] project founder

One thing to note is that the Microsoft XML formats and schemas, either those exported by TextEdit or by the .docx format, are not necessarily done by Microsoft by choice. They're not even in response to OpenOffice.org. In my opinion, they are the result of "government forced technology", similar to how the California clean air regulations back in the 70s started to force Detroit to pour more money into catalytic converters and environmentally friendly cars.

There have been numerous government proposals and mandates that require open document formats. Some of the Massachusetts proposals come to mind. I believe the EU also has proposals on the table that require the use of open document formats. The trick with the EU proposal is that it actually mentioned XML (I believe it's the ISIS proposal, but may have the wrong acronym). Governments are large Microsoft customers and Microsoft doesn't want to lose their business. Including the ability to save in publicly documented XML formats gives them a loophole to continue selling to governments, even if all of the open document format requirements are adopted.

The ability of OpenOffice.org (and NeoOffice/J) to support these formats really is dependent on two things. First, the schemas are licensed from Microsoft on non-OSS compatible terms. Each individual person or application has to enter into a licensing agreement with Microsoft individually. This is directly against the terms of either BSD style or GPL style licensing. Secondly, Microsoft may have software patents involved with their schemas according to their licensing terms. While the patentability of a schema itself is questionable, they seem to have several patents revolving around the interpretation of XML schemas that may apply to their Office schemas. This goes against the CDDL style licensing Sun is now fond of.

Because of these terms, the only ways that OOo/NeoOffice could legally support them would be if either the schemas are clean room reverse engineered from example documents or if Microsoft turns a blind eye to open source folk using their schemas. Since I wouldn't want to rely on Microsoft's generosity, the clean room solution is the only way I can see. Sun won't be the one to clean room them either; they don't have to. StarOffice (and Sun built OpenOffice.org for Linux/Solaris/Win) would be covered under Sun's cross-licensing arrangements with Microsoft as a result of their settlement. Those licenses don't extend to non-Sun OOo developers like me, however, so we're all up shit creek.

Just because you can read it and the format is "open" doesn't mean it's "free". You can be sure that Microsoft's lobbyists will make sure that all of those government directives still refer to "open" and no "free" gets snuck in there by mistake.

ed

Re:in case you're curious...

[Trillan]

Well, that's often the case, but I'm betting you could encapsulate two words in a way that could be transported back to Word (with formatting intact) a lot more efficiently.

A lot of the bulk seems to be Word saving unused style sheets, which arguably doesn't need to be done to keep the document true.

Re:in case you're curious...

[rohanl]

The PDF format is a particularly good example of this. The file contains a set of atoms, and finally at the end of the file is an index that selects which atoms to include and in what order.

Multiple indexes can be included, and the last one found is used.

This means that you can actually save, and update a PDF file, by just appending to the end. You can even save the file on a WORM device that allows multiple sessions.

Doing this also maintains a full file history too. You can retrieve any version of the file by selecting one of the many indexes.

Of course, whether any programs do this is another matter...