Re: Word Processors

[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.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>from MS >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

It's Not Just a .doc and .xls World Anymore

IMHO
December 18, 1997

John Swenson
MSDN Online

With all the announcements Microsoft makes these days, it's easy for
important news to slip by without notice. It
would have been easy, for example, to miss the relatively quiet December
15 announcement that the next version of
Office will feature HTML as a companion file format to Microsoft's
proprietary Office file formats.

When I read the December 15, 1997 Microsoft press release, "Microsoft
Office Breaks Ground by Adopting HTML
Standard as File Format,"
(http://www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/press/1997/Dec97/htmlpr.htm) on this,
I did a double
take. You mean after all these years of working with Word documents,
Excel spreadsheets, and other Office file
formats, Microsoft is suddenly going to let millions of Office users
start working with a single, standard .htm
Web file format? Wow.

Reading further, I saw that the next version of Office will continue to
let users open, save, and create .doc
files, .xls files, .ppt files, and other native Office file formats. But
Office users who want to switch to a
native Web format will be able to work with all their Office documents
as .htm files, or convert any native Office
file to HTML.

But can't you already make this HTML conversion in Office 97, I
wondered, simply by choosing Save as HTML . . . in
the File menu of each Office application? The press release was short on
details, so I called Andrew Dixon, a
product manager on the Office team.

Separate but equal

"The best way to describe this is that we're elevating HTML to the same
level as our own proprietary Office file
formats," Dixon explained.

This improved HTML support in Office will enable seamless
"round-tripping" between HTML file formats and native
Office file formats. In other words, users will be able to switch their
Office documents back and forth between
HTML and native Office file formats at any time, without losing any
formatting.

Office users will be able to save a Word document in HTML, for example,
and open it back up in Word (or a browser)
while preserving all important data such as PivotTable dynamic views and
complex charts and tables. Even long
documents filled with editing marks and Word Art will look exactly the
same whether they're saved as Word
documents or HTML files.

The same goes for documents created in any Office application, including
Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook.
Excel users will be able to switch their Excel spreadsheets to HTML, for
example, and still preserve their Excel
pivot tables.

Today when users save Office documents in HTML, they look very similar
to the way they appear in the Office file
formats, but not identical. In the future, such documents will look
identical. This means anyone using a Web
browser on any platform will be able to open Office documents and see
them exactly as they should look, even if
they don't have Office installed on their PC.

How'd they do that?

This seamless back-and-forth switching between file formats is possible
because some clever developers on the
Office team figured out how to save Office documents in HTML without
losing any of the rich document formatting
possible with Excel, Word, or the other Office applications.

Microsoft couldn't accomplish this file-format conversion trick by using
straight HTML though. The next version of
Office will also rely on XML (Extensible Markup Language) to preserve
richly formatted Office documents in the
.htm format.

In case you're unfamiliar with XML, this is the new Web technology that
made a big splash at the December Internet
World 1997 trade show in New York City. See the "XML: One Hot
Abbreviation, but What Does It Mean?" article I
wrote on the topic for more information.

XML complements, not replaces, HTML. It provides a standard format to
describe different types of data, so that
the information can be decoded, manipulated, and displayed consistently
and correctly. Like HTML, XML is an
industry standard, or at least in the process of becoming one.
(Microsoft is working closely with the W3C to
develop the XML 1.0 specification, which is now in the "proposed
recommendation" stage.) 

Rather than get bogged down in a technical explanation of how Office
will use XML, I'll stick to the topic of the
file-format change.

The decision to make HTML a companion file format to the native Office
file formats was "an incredibly important
design decision for the next version of Office," Dixon says.

The chief reason for making this big file-format switch is-you guessed
it-the rising importance of the Web.
Letting Office users save their documents as HTML will make it a snap
for companies and other organizations to
post documents on their intranet and Internet Web sites. If Office users
save their original documents as HTML
files, there won't even be any conversion process. Documents will be
able to go straight onto the Web.

Making HTML a standard Office file format also promises to eliminate the
file-exchange headache for organizations
trying to share their documents with the outside world. Users will be
able to send Office documents via e-mail and
know the person at the other end of the line can open the documents with
all their formatting intact.

The developer opportunity

So what is this file-format change likely to mean for developers? A lot.
Since HTML and XML are industry-standard
file formats, the next version of Office should open the door to all
sorts of new third-party and custom
applications, Dixon says. Any application that supports HTML will be
able to open Office documents and edit them,
allowing developers to create new applications linked to Office. "That
opens all kinds of doors," Dixon says.

It's still too early to discuss what the new opportunities might be for
third-party developers, he says.
(Microsoft isn't talking release dates yet for the next version of
Office, in case you were wondering.) But
forward-thinking developers can use their imaginations and start
thinking now about how their applications might
be able to take advantage of an Office that uses HTML as a standard file
format.

With the rapid rise of the Web, it's inevitable the Office team would
tie the suite even more tightly to HTML. But
until now, who would have predicted they'd find a way to create Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, and Access documents in
HTML-without sacrificing any formatting? 

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