Re: Word Processors

[Daniel Veillard <Daniel Veillard w3 org>]

Quoting Timothy Ritchey (tritchey@vne.com):
> > born to do it. Word 6/95/97/2000 should be a high on list but I'm
> > think we may chase our tails in closed formats on that one.
> 
> One thing someone might look into is what office 2000 is going to
> support. I heard a rumor that Word 2000 (or whatever FUBAR versioning
> scheme they choose to use) was going to use XML as a document format.
> They have already moved their help files to HTML, and may be moving in
> the same direction for Word. 
> 
> Well, I spoke too soon - I did a quick search, and found the following
> document on microsoft's site. In this case, I would recommend creating a
> WP that does XML/HTML this makes things MUCH easier since there are a
> wide number of parsers, layout engines, etc. Think of all the work going
> into the new mozilla layout engine that could be pluged into such a WP.
> anyway, here is the document from MS web site. I had to go through a
> painful regestration process to get it, so I thought I would just paste
> it here.

  My understanding is that Office 2000 applications will be able to export
tho an HTML + XML format. Basically an HTML framework for the document and
"islands" of XML for embedded structured objects (like piece of spreadsheet,
vector graphics, etc ...).
  Unfortunately HTML parser are hard to design, you will definitely find
some code (Mozilla, Amaya, etc ...) but the rendering is a difficult problem
and the actual HTML found on the Web is amazingly bad ! The XML parts on
the other hand are probably the easiest part to decode/display since it's
strongly structured and it shouldn't be too difficult to parse/conver/render.
  
  Daniel

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