Re: Word Processors

[Timothy Ritchey <tritchey vne com>]

> I agree It save and load HTML (PW does, formatting lost on load :()
> and XML.
> Can someone more familliar with XML comment about it.
> My understanding is that it lets app designers create custom tag.
> The great thing is that you only need one parser to read any
> format. When an app wants to support an XML file created by
> another app, it only needs to implement those tags -- leaving
> the parseing untouched.

XML is a subset of SGML. It does not specify the tags that you use -
merely the format that those tags must take. Whether your program
understands those tags or not is a different matter. There is not enough
info in the article to figure out how exactly M$ is doing this, but I
suspect the following - when you save a Word document as an HTML file,
the parts of the file that are to be displayed will be placed in
traditional HTML tags, perhaps with style sheets, all the new and fancy
document layout elements, etc. Additional information will then be
placed in XML tags which would allow word to regain all of its
proprietary information when and if the document was reopened. Any other
viewer would simply ignore this unrecognized HTML information, and
display the raw HTML. At a basic level, being able to open and save HTML
docs makes it compatible. Dealing with the XML portions will mean
getting a handle on M$'s proprietary tags. They may give this
information out - and then again, they may not.

tim