Office 12 to Feature New XML File Formats

Grok Headline matches for Office 12 to Feature New XML File Formats

Office 12 to use XML for file formats

Office 12 to use XML for file formats 06/05/2005 10:53 PM
Microsoft is embracing XML as the default file format for the next version of Microsoft Office. Is that good news for competing office apps?

Office 12 to Get New File Formats

Office 12 to Get New File Formats 06/05/2005 10:58 PM
Microsoft is making XML-based file formats the default in its next-generation Office suite. Will users bite or take flight?

Mac Office 12 Will Support XML File
Formats, Too

Mac Office 12 Will Support XML File
Formats, Too 06/05/2005 10:58 PM
We haven't heard much about the next version of Mac Office, dubbed Mac Office 12. But we do know now that Microsoft is aiming to make sure it supports the same XML file formats that the company announced Thursday for the Windows version of the desktop office suite.

Mac Office 12 to Get XML Formats, Too

Mac Office 12 to Get XML Formats, Too 06/05/2005 11:59 PM
Rick Shaut, a member of the Macintosh Office team, wrote in his Web log that the Macintosh version of Office 12 will also support the Office Open XML format announced Thursday for its Windows counterpart. He also admitted Microsoft Mac Business Unit had fallen behind on XML support within the Office Suite.

Follow-up: MS Office Formats Not Open

Follow-up: MS Office Formats Not Open 02/01/2005 09:43 PM

BetaNews | Analyst: MS Office Formats Not Open

As we reported here, Robert Scoble first announced that certain elements of Microsoft Office would become Open Source. Now it looks like MS might have taken a few liberties with the term. Read the article above and see what you think.

Microsoft Patenting Office XML Formats

Microsoft Patenting Office XML Formats 01/24/2004 07:06 AM
Slashdot Jan 24 2004 10:14AM GMT

Office 12 XML Formats Seen As Risky For
Microsoft

Office 12 XML Formats Seen As Risky For
Microsoft 06/05/2005 11:18 PM
Information Week Jun 6 2005 3:26AM GMT

Microsoft to Adopt XML Formats in Office
12

Microsoft to Adopt XML Formats in Office
12 06/05/2005 11:43 PM
Microsoft will use XML to make Word, Excel and PowerPoint more secure and efficient in Office 12.

Analyst: MS Office Formats Not Open

Analyst: MS Office Formats Not Open 02/01/2005 08:41 PM
Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox has blasted recent media reports that claim Microsoft has opened up its Office file formats. The reports state that Microsoft has reached an agreement with the state of Massachusetts to ease its XML licensing restrictions. But Wilcox calls the news "little more than PR FUD."

Microsoft Office Formats Not Really
Being Opened

Microsoft Office Formats Not Really
Being Opened 02/01/2005 09:39 PM
Slashdot Feb 1 2005 1:14PM GMT

Pining For Open File Formats

Pining For Open File Formats 09/08/2004 04:52 AM
I still seethe over all the extra work, and silly hoops I had to jump through, because vendors feel compelled to create proprietary formats for storing information, and make it hard for other people's software to simply read and write the information to achieve whatever goals their users might be pursuing. By James Elliott, O'Reilly Network (via MyAppleMenu)

Online music and file formats

Online music and file formats 10/29/2003 03:28 AM
Will the AAC file format that Apple uses for its iTunes Music Store become another file-format disaster like .DOC or .GIF? A Salon.com article explores the world of online music services and the file formats that the music is delivered in. Though Apple has based its AAC file format on an open media standard, the digital rights management part of the file format , called "FairPlay," is a closed format owned by Apple, which raises concerns that consumers could be forced to only use...

KnowledgeTank 1.1 opens more file
formats

KnowledgeTank 1.1 opens more file
formats 05/04/2004 07:55 AM
Memsculpt today announced the release of Knowledgetank 1.1 for Mac OS X, an information management utility that helps users keep track of information such as URLs, files, projects, recipes, books, DVDs, CDs, sourcecode, and more...

Linus Defends Proprietary File Formats

Linus Defends Proprietary File Formats 04/13/2005 02:30 PM

Create a file upload feature with C#

Create a file upload feature with C# 12/11/2003 02:48 AM
CNET Dec 11 2003 2:44AM ET

Feature: First look: Bridge replaces
File Browser

Feature: First look: Bridge replaces
File Browser 04/03/2005 11:48 PM
The 2003 release of Photoshop CS brought with it File Browser, which could quickly scan folders full of image and PDF files and prioritize images with the Flag command. Creative Suite 2’s Bridge is the File Browser written large.

Pepsi ads to feature file-sharing teens

Pepsi ads to feature file-sharing teens 01/23/2004 02:20 PM
Pepsi is recruiting RIAA-targetted file-sharers for its TV ads.

Some 20 teens sued by the Recording Industry Association of America, which accuses them of unauthorized downloads, will appear in a Pepsi-Cola (PEP) ad that kicks off a two-month offer of up to 100 million free -- and legal -- downloads from Apple's iTunes, the leading online music seller. The sassy ad, to be seen by Super Bowl's 88 million viewers on Feb 1, is a wink at the download hot button. Pepsi hopes the promotion will connect its flagship cola, as well as Sierra Mist and Diet Pepsi, with teens who've shown more affinity for bottled water, energy drinks and the Internet.

Lin k

DiscBlaze gets new default file system
feature

DiscBlaze gets new default file system
feature 07/28/2004 06:08 PM
Radical Breeze has released DiscBlaze 4.0.2, a free update to its CD and DVD burning software for Mac OS X (10.2.6 or higher)...

Okino's ‘Granite/Pack V3' Provides
Affordable Access to ACIS, IGES,
Parasolids, Pro/ENGINEER, Pro/DESKTOP,
STEP and VDA-FS CAD File Formats for
Data Translation, Viewing, Rendering &
Animation

Okino's ‘Granite/Pack V3' Provides
Affordable Access to ACIS, IGES,
Parasolids, Pro/ENGINEER, Pro/DESKTOP,
STEP and VDA-FS CAD File Formats for
Data Translation, Viewing, Rendering &
Animation 09/02/2004 02:25 AM
Okino Computer Graphics Ships Third Generation of Affordable, Precise, Solids-Based CAD Import Converters based on PTC Granite 3.0 Interoperability Kernel [PRWEB Sep 2, 2004]

Windows CE Feature-By-Feature Comparison

Windows CE Feature-By-Feature Comparison 06/28/2004 11:51 AM
The downloadable document available on this page is a comparison between the current versions of Windows CE 5.0 and its predecessors. The comparison is based on the Windows CE product catalog. This side-by-side comparison highlights the new features and increased functionality from Windows CE 3.0 through to the latest version, Windows CE 5.0, to help you determine which feature set is best suited to the requirements of your target device.

Xbox Live Gets Feature UpgradeMicrosoft
has bumped up the feature content of its
Xbox Live service today

Xbox Live Gets Feature UpgradeMicrosoft
has bumped up the feature content of its
Xbox Live service today 04/22/2004 02:35 AM
Gigex Apr 22 2004 6:26AM GMT

Take Along the Music in All Its Many
Formats

Take Along the Music in All Its Many
Formats 09/15/2004 10:58 PM
New York Times Sep 16 2004 2:44AM GMT

Understanding HD Formats

Understanding HD Formats 01/19/2004 08:29 AM
High-definition television (HDTV) first arrived on the national stage in the late 1980s, but even today only a minority of consumers in the United States and a much smaller minority in other industrialized nations have HDTV systems. However, high-definition (HD) production for video and film is increasing rapidly, as is the installed base of high-definition-capable displays. Consumers are demanding higher-quality content that takes advantage of these better displays. In addition to the content delivered over the airwaves, a significant amount of content will be delivered to the displays through computers. This demand will help to further drive the increasing availability of HD content.

Bridgewater Formats GPRS

Bridgewater Formats GPRS 05/05/2004 08:28 AM
Unstrung.com May 5 2004 12:38PM GMT

New Digital Audio Formats

New Digital Audio Formats 06/13/2004 12:16 PM

Microsoft on Patenting XML Formats

Microsoft on Patenting XML Formats 01/27/2004 11:30 AM
I recently asked whether Microsoft's moves to patent the XML formats it's using in new versions of Office were, once again, a customer lock-in ploy. Here's a (slightely edited) reply from Mark Martin, who's employed by the Microsoft's PR company:

Web Page Date Formats

Web Page Date Formats 07/12/2002 10:44 AM
A general survey on date format usage.

Binary data formats? Just say NO!
(XML.org)

Binary data formats? Just say NO!
(XML.org) 06/26/2002 01:00 PM

A survey of playlist formats

A survey of playlist formats 04/26/2004 01:14 PM
the great thing about standards is that there's so many of them to choose from.

Free Culture formats

Free Culture formats 04/09/2004 04:06 PM
The free Free Culture was released as a pdf under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. Some complained about the format. Others, relying upon the freedom granted, created derivative works in other formats. So far, 36 hours after the book was released, I know of 9 versions available, including: MS-re ader, Rocke t e-Book, zippe d, iSilo , Mobip ocket, EasyR ead, PostScri pt, Pl ain Text, html. Most of these are from Blackmask, but thanks to Firas, Mike and Josh as well.

Versioning and extensibility in XML
formats

Versioning and extensibility in XML
formats 09/20/2004 12:26 PM

On the Atom-Syntax list they're talking about versioning and extensibility, two problems that are very easily solved in XML.

For versioning, define a required version attribute on the feed element, a string in the form x.y, where x and y are two numbers. X is the major version, and y is the minor version. So a version 0.3 feed would have a version attribute whose value is "0.3". A version 1.0 feed would have a version attribute of "1.0".

For extensibility, allow the format to be extended through namespaces and trust the W3C, who is the owner of the namespaces spec to tell you how to do it. Build on the works of others.

For extra credit, the format should evolve by adding new elements. A processor can tell whether it should expect the new elements or not by checking the top-level version attribute.

I honestly don't think there's another way to do it, so all the arguing and fussing is just going to end up there, so you might as well just do it. Of course this is just my opinion, I have no position re the Atom working group, or the RSS advisory board.

Open document formats

Open document formats 06/17/2004 11:33 AM
Last week Tim Bray wrote about his (and Sun's) involvement in the European Commission's investigation into the OpenOffice and Microsoft flavors of XML office documents. The upshot:

You can find the Committee's conclusions here; they're short, readable, and defy summarization. [ongoing]

The conclusions are indeed concise, and the bulleted recommendations even more so. I'll quote them here, changing only <ul> to <ol> for ease of reference:

Therefore, it is recommended that:

1. The OASIS Technical Committee considers whether there is a need and opportunity for extending the emerging OASIS Open Document Format to allow for custom-defined schemas;
2. Industry actors not currently involved with the OASIS Open Document Format consider participating in the standardisation process in order to encourage a wider industry consensus around the format;
3. Submission of the emerging OASIS Open Document Format to an official standardisation organisation such as ISO is considered;
4. Microsoft considers issuing a public commitment to publish and provide non-discriminatory access to future versions of its WordML specifications;
5. Microsoft should consider the merits of submitting XML formats to an international standards body of their choice;
6. Microsoft assesses the possibility of excluding non-XML formatted components from WordML documents;
7. Industry is encouraged to provide filters that allow documents based on the WordML specifications and the emerging OASIS Open Document Format to be read and written to other applications whilst maintaining a maximum degree of faithfulness to content, structure and presentation. These filters should be made available for all products;
8. Industry is encouraged to provide the appropriate tools and services to allow the public sector to consider feasibility and costs of a transformation of its documents to XML-based formats;
9. The public sector is encouraged to provide its information through several formats. Where by choice or circumstance only a single revisable document format can be used this should be for a format around which there is industry consensus, as demonstrated by the format's adoption as a standard.

...

Tired of being locked into formats?
Well then don't!

Tired of being locked into formats?
Well then don't! 01/18/2004 01:39 PM

I'm not a fan of OPML, I think it's a truly awful (and unnecessary) format - other people have found < FONT color=#333366>it problematic too - but I did think Dave Winer's Share Your OPML! site looked interesting, especially when there was a little SDK available. But then yesterday I read Eric's post pointing to the floater Dave had left in the pool :
If you wish to use the data for a different kind of application, or convert the data into a format other than OPML, for redistribution, it's likely we'll say yes, but you must ask first.

Anyone that's had dealings with Dave in the past will know what this means. Leigh asked (in comments) but had his request deleted. Basically Dave wants control, and he believes the formats will give him that control (remember the RSS patent application?).

I'm all for republishing, but not with strings attached. I don't want material under my copyright abused in this way. So I politely asked Dave to remove references to sites I maintain from his data. Anyhow, Dave's response was:
Do you want to make a legal case out of this?

Personally I thought that was pretty sad, but that might in part be cultural bias - being English I tend to think of etiquette before litigation. Whatever, unfortunately for Dave, and fortunately for the rest of us, formats aren't such a lever any more because the web will either ignore or work around attempts at lock-in.

I think the most sensible thing is to simply ignore Dave's site, but for purposes of demonstration, here's a workaround. The key obstacle is that Dave insists that you can't republish his data unless it's in OPML format. If it is OPML, you don't even have to ask. Ok, here is another version of the index file that points to all the others at "Share Your OPML!". This is still OPML format. Please do with it what you like. Incidentally, this new file is also valid RDF/XML.

Given that OPML is as thinly specified as it gets, and RDF/XML is designed to make it easy to make XML formats RDF compatible, it wasn't particularly difficult. Here's what RDF-compatible OPML looks like:

<opml opml:version="2.0"
xmlns="http://opml.scripting.com"
xmlns:opml="http://opml.scripting.com"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
< ;head/>
<body rdf:parseType="Resource">
<outline opml:text="John Blog" opml:ctUpdates="8" opml:type="link" opml:url="http://example.org" opml:whenLastUpdate="Wed, 14 Jan 2004 03:28:00 GMT" />
</body>
</opml>


I first had to add some attributes to the <opml> element to give the XML namespace support. That top element becomes a resource in the (stripey) RDF interpretation, with head and body as properties, their contents being other resources. To keep things simple I just ignored the contents of the <head> element, so that gets interpreted as a triple with an empty object (I must check on the semantics of that). The element itself is mandatory in OPML, so that has to stay.
The <body> in effect contains a set of resources of type outline, which is easy to express by adding the rdf:parseType="Resource" attribute on the parent. The attributes of the <outline> elements all slip neatly into being RDF properties with literal values.

Couple of points that probably need explanation - since the spec update there's been no need to include a root <rdf:RDF> element. If the consumer knows it's RDF, that's good enough (the W3C's validator has check box: "RDF is NOT enclosed in <RDF>...</RDF> tags"). Also the use of unqualified attributes has been deprecated, so it should be opml:text="..." rather than just text="...". This makes the code look a bit uglier, but if you're using a lot of namespaces it does make mistakes much less likely.

I made the changes using search and replace, but this could easily be automated using XSLT. But if you are planning on using Userland format data from anywhere else, it's probably a better bet to use something a little less generic than the approach above (stylesheets for OPML to OCS and Userland RSS to RSS 1.0 are linked in the comments here).[Raw]

Speaking of Image Formats

Speaking of Image Formats 07/22/2004 03:06 PM

The lame UNISYS LZW patent has kept GIF support out of free software for some time. The patent has now expired worldwide, so the popular GD Graphics Library now has GIF support again, after a very long absence.

gd 2.0.28 has been released. gd 2.0.28 restores support for reading and writing GIF images.

So now you can fire up PHP and render your on-the-fly 'Punch The Monkey' animated banner ads.

Click here to comment on this entry

Re-ripping CDs to new formats in iTunes

Re-ripping CDs to new formats in iTunes 06/24/2004 11:26 AM
If you want to rip a CD in AAC format, but have already ripped it in MP3 format, insert the CD in your Mac and click Import in iTunes 4. It will tell you that some songs are already in the library, and will give an option to ...

Duel of the dual-layer DVD formats

Duel of the dual-layer DVD formats 12/30/2003 06:27 PM
globetechnology.com Dec 30 2003 5:10PM ET

Dying Languages, Fading Formats

Dying Languages, Fading Formats 03/20/2003 03:13 PM

Next-generation DVD formats rally
support

Next-generation DVD formats rally
support 01/06/2005 11:55 PM
Groups supporting competing formats build support from their latest partners.

Designing Extensible, Versionable XML
Formats

Designing Extensible, Versionable XML
Formats 08/04/2004 01:25 AM
Dare Obasanjo discusses what considerations you should make when versioning XML formats, as well as covering some approaches to designing extensible XML formats in a manner compatible with existing XML technologies. (23 printed pages) An XML vocabulary should be designed in such a way that the applications that process it do not break when it is inevitably changed. One of the primary benefits of using XML for building data interchange formats is that the APIs and technologies for processing XML are quite resilient additions to vocabularies. If I write an application that loads RSS feeds looking for item elements, then processes their link and title elements using any one of the various technologies and APIs for processing, such as SAX, the DOM or XSLT, it is straightforward to build the application so that it is unaffected by changes in the RSS specification or extensions as long as the link and title elements always appear in a feed.
Grok Description matches for Office 12 to Feature New XML File Formats
GrokA matches for Office 12 to Feature New XML File Formats

Office 12 to Feature New XML File Formats

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