Jul 29 2010

ISO

Category: Microsoft office 2010 — admin @ 7:26 pm

Rick Jelliffe, who has a wealth experience with ISO and standards has two posts that clearly call this out:

  • Gartner, Groklaw 0. Rick 1

“ODF, for example, will change in no substantive way in its ISO adoption. National body comments will be added to requests or requirements for future versions. Many people like buy Office 2010 Home.The Ecma Open XML people, so far, are being far more concilliatory in this regard: they know that a Microsoft technology doesn’t have the presumption of innocence that a Sun format does, in the minds of many. Office Professional 2010 is great!

If Microsoft/Ecma/et al manage to demonstrate to the ISO member voters that Open XML had even a first round of openness at Ecma, that it has some different use from ODF, if it supports SC34 specs like RELAX NG, and is scrupulous in its partitioning of Windows-specific hooks to another layer or namespace, I don’t see any national body rejecting Open XML, frankly. Microsoft and Ecma still have work to do in this regard, but it is just the standard kind of technical-level education/discussion/wordsmithing/re-alignment that any specification should have. “ The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.

  • Open XML at ISO sideshow

“They are generating lots of media attention, FUD and lobbeying; but it ODF and Open XML both represent a victory for universal, ubiquitous, standard generalized markup, which is what SC 34 is in large part about. I see Gartner has estimated a less than 70% chance of ISO ratifying two XML office formats. What rubbish. I’ll know more next week.By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time.

Ultimately, it is not WG1 or SC34 that makes the decision. It is the national votes of each of the voting members of ISO: the national standards organizations like Standards Australia, ANSI, and so on. While local committees may feel that Microsoft has been conspicuous in their absense, so have the other big companies in recent years: the standards participation focus shifted to W3C and OASIS. Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.But these committees are not stacked with anti-Microsoft (or anti-Sun) people, but with organizations who need good interchange and also need an XML retrieval for legacy documents in proprietary formats (.DOC, etc.). So I find it very difficult to agree with Gartner’s 70%; I’d put it the other way, with a 70% likelihood of success, at least. Office 2010 key is for you now!

ISO is not an anti-monopoly court. It is there to help people who want to agree on technology, providing procedures, forums and a publishing house.

But the issue of having two office standards is a fair one. I think all Microsoft needs to do is to distinguish Open XML from ODF adequately and prove that it has a credible alternative constituency who would not be served well by ODF. That there is overlap is immaterial if there is a significant difference.” Office 2010 download is available now!

For anyone who has played around with the XML formats, I’m sure you’ve seen that we really took seriously our goal of minimal user impact in the move to default XML formats. This included things like performance (which I’ve already briefly touched when I talked about spreadsheetML, tag lengths, and shared formulas), as well as full compatibility with the existing base of Office documents. I’ve just recently started to show some basic examples of where ODF just doesn’t come through in terms of compatibility, such as with formulas, numbering formats, and highlighting (and these were just the first three things I came across… I have a growing list that I’ll talk about over the coming months).

Jul 29 2010

Open XML in ISO

Category: Microsoft office — admin @ 7:24 pm

As we move forward with the standardization of the Office Open XML formats, it’s interesting to look at the motivations that brought us to this point, but also to think about what is still to come. Office Professional 2010 is great!We’ve wanted to provide folks with easier ways to work with our formats for years now, mainly because it significantly increases the value of Office documents when they are fully documented. An open format can integrate with business processes; databases; and workflows in a much simpler and more powerful way (for more on why we made the move to open formats, read here and here). The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.That’s why we’ve worked so hard over the past 3 or 4 releases to invest in other formats like RTF, HTML, and XML. These new Open XML formats which will be the default format for Office 2007 (as well as work in Office 2000, XP and 2003) are the result of all that work. If you’ve read my blog at all you know that it’s been a serious evolution and a lot of work, and I’m really excited about the potential. By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time.

We already have hundreds of thousands of external developers building solutions on top of the XML formats from Office 2003 which weren’t even the default formats so you can imagine how huge this move to a new default XML formats is.Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.

One thing I’ve heard from a number of folks though is that they are wondering what the next steps will be for the formats once they are standardized. Well, ultimately that is up to the organization that has taken over the ownership and maintenance of the formats. We’re currently standardizing the formats at Ecma international, which would mean that Ecma (which consists of representatives from a large number of companies in the industry) would own the formats as well as determine how the formats evolve. Office 2010 key is for you now!There has also been talk though of taking the formats to ISO once they have been approved by Ecma, which would mean that if ISO chooses to adopt the Open XML formats the stewardship of the formats would be theirs. We’ve had a number of governments indicate that they would like the formats to be given to ISO, and it’s likely that after the Ecma approval that will be the next step.Office 2010 download is available now!

A number of people have asked if the approval of ODF by ISO has an impact on the standardization of Open XML. I don’t believe so given that ODF and Open XML have two very different goals in mind. Open XML was designed around compatibility with the existing base of Microsoft Office documents. There are literally billions of documents that exist today in those binary formats, and the goal of Open XML is to allow for a seamless migration from those old formats into the new XML formats.Many people like buy Office 2010 Home. This is a huge undertaking, and it’s the reason that the spec is so large. I think that given the obvious need for an open XML format that achieves these goals, and the fact that ODF was not designed for that purpose, it’s clear that there isn’t a direct conflict between the two formats and there is no reason ISO wouldn’t want to approve and steward both formats.

Jul 29 2010

One interesting discussion

Category: Microsoft office 2010 — admin @ 7:22 pm

One interesting discussion that came up in some of my previous posts was whether it was better to use <b> and <i> or <strong> and <em> when people applied bold or italic formatting to their text.The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world. Having the <b> and <i> tags in the HTML guarantees that the look of the document will likely not change regardless of style sheet (it’s more likely that <strong> would have CSS props than <b>). On the other hand, <strong> and <em> provide much more flexibility in that they really only imply semantics and not display values. While <strong> and <em> have a default presentation, it is often overwritten by the CSS of the page or the rendering engine.By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time

Some people were saying that there are occasions where <b> and <i> better capture what the user intended. While I do agree that may be the case at times, I believe also our UI encourages the use of bold and italic when the user often was just trying to convey the semantics. In most cases, I believe they would have specified strong or emphasis if it were as easy and obvious as bold and italic (there just hasn’t in been a benefit to doing so in the past). Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.Since we are going the route of XHTML compliance and we are concentrating on structure rather than presentation, we opted to always output strong/em rather than a more confusing mixture of the two (bold/italic and strong/em).Office 2010 key is for you now!

 

Custom Styles

 

One area that we are looking at investing in is giving folks the ability to add custom styles to the blogging template that would then be output as a simple style tag. So unlike the above examples where the style is mapped to a specific XHTML tag, we would simply output a <p> or <span> where the class name then matches the style. Office 2010 download is available now!So, if a user adds the style “foo” to their blogging template then when that style is applied we would output:

<p class=“foo“>…..</p>

We would not output the formatting information for the style because in most cases the CSS would be stripped upon publishing to a blog provider. Instead, with this approach, you could rely on the CSS of the host site of the blog to specify the presentation information for those custom styles.Many people like buy Office 2010 Home.

 

Comments are welcome

 

Any comments or questions are welcome. Also let me know if there are any other similar structures you guys are interested in talking about next (ordered and unordered lists, definition lists)? Office Professional 2010 is great!

Jul 29 2010

microsoft office 2007 Word XHTML

Category: Microsoft office — admin @ 7:20 pm

This is the third post by Zeyad Rajabi who owns the XHTML output from Word’s new blogging feature. Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.In earlier posts, Zeyad discussed a general overview of the XHTML as well as a more detailed post on XHML compliance. Today Zeyad is discussing the ways in which styles have been directly tied to specific XHTML tags. Office 2010 key is for you now!

Today I wanted to talk a bit about the template that we use for the Word 2007 blogging feature. Word has always concentrated on the presentation of documents and making it easy for people to quickly create a great looking document. The area that we haven’t focused on as much though is allowing people to better specify the semantic meaning of their content. Office 2010 download is available now!We’ve been slowly moving in that direction with the custom XML support in Word 2003 and the content controls and XML mapping in Word 2007. We actually leverage a content control to allow you to specify the blog’s title.

One of the oldest ways folks would specify semantic meaning in a Word document though was by using styles, and we’ve done work in Word 2007 to make styles much more convenient for the average end user. Many people like buy Office 2010 Home.We’ve created a number of Word styles that we map directly to XHTML tags of semantic meaning (like <strong> <em> and <blockquote>). We then let the browser and blog sites determine how to render these tags (based on stylesheets, etc.).

In Word 2007 one of our investments was giving our users easy access to applying styles via “quick styles”.Office Professional 2010 is great! In our blog template we provide a list of styles that can be applied to the contents of the document as you can see in the screen shot below:

 

Styles

 

These styles are all significant in that we can map them directly to XHTML tags (rather than simply to formatting properties). Below is a table listing all the styles provided by our blog template and their XHTML equivalent.The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.

Style HTML
Heading h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6
Normal p
Quote blockquote
Code <pre><code>… </code></pre>*
Strong strong
Emphasis em

*The code style is being added post Beta 2. 

By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time.What do you guys think of having a style called “Code” that actually nests pre and code together? Word differs from the web in that we automatically preserve whitespace, so in order for us to correctly output XHTML for the code style we also need to output the preformatted style.

Jul 29 2010

microsoft office 2007 Word’s support

Category: Microsoft office 2010 — admin @ 7:18 pm

If you’re heading out to TechEd this week like I am, you should definitely plan on attending Tristan Davis’ talk on Thursday afternoon that covers the new functionality in Word 2007 for custom XML solutions.The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.

This talk goes into great detail on the true power of XML in Office applications. XML file formats are obviously important, but the really exciting stuff isn’t what you can do with the wordprocessing schemas but instead it’s with the support for your own schemas. By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and timePeople want their office documents to seemlessly interoperate with business processes and solutions, and custom schema support is the way you can achieve it. With schemas like Open XML and ODF, you are generating wordprocessing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.With custom defined schema support, you can take it to the next level and instead create invoices, trip reports, product specifications, research reports, pitchbooks, reviews, articles, resumes, applications, etc., etc., etc. There are no limits to the types of documents you can create, as you have the ability to define the schema.Office 2010 key is for you now!

I blogged earlier this year on both the importance of custom defined schemas as well as the new content controls in Word 2007. There is also a new article up on openxmldeveloper that shows some more examples of how to drop your own XML into a .docx file and map the values into the surface of the document.Office 2010 download is available now!

Here is the description of Tristan’s talk where he’ll show a number of examples as well as dig into the ways you can leverage Word 2007 to build powerful solutions:

OFC335 Microsoft Office Word 2007 XML Programmability: True Data/View Separation and Rich Eventing for Custom XML

Day/Time: Thursday, June 15 4:30 PM – 5:45 PM Room: 257 AB
Speaker(s): Tristan Davis

Microsoft Office Word 2007 brings a data model that allows data and presentation to be managed separately, extending the structured document concept introduced in Word 2003. Many people like buy Office 2010 Home.This includes significant investments in the support for custom XML data in the new Office Open XML file formats, as well as rich access to that data from within the application. Developers can work directly against the XML data via XML mappings to the Word document, or via embedded InfoPath solutions in the Document Information Panel. In this session, we introduce these new capabilities, then dive into the functionality of the Office XML data store (which provides custom XML storage), and how it can be leveraged to build solutions that will strongly tie Word documents to your business processes.Office Professional 2010 is great!

Track(s): Office System
Session Type(s): Breakout Session
Session Level(s): 300

Hope to see you all there.