Re: The sky is starting to fall again
Granted I'm not up to speed on WordML
I'm not either. There's a recent précis on the state of MS Office XML at O'Reilly:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6649
The author never quite gets around to the thing everyone wants to know: does WordProcessingML constitute the opening of the MS Word file format? He *does* say that saving native MS Word to WordProcessingML creates crazy-quilt XML, but is hopeful this will improve. What's not said is whether users can -- perhaps with difficulty -- sort-out a de facto DTD for WordProcessingML and create fully-featured MS Word documents with a text editor or programmatically, as can be done with OpenOffice files. That would mean universal interchange is/will be possible, but it's not clear to me that that's even a Microsoft goal. I suspect it's not.
The test is whether there'll be a public namespace and DTD(s).
Which returns me to my original question, "What's the difference between 'based on XML' and 'is XML'?" Until that's clear, all I hear Microsoft saying wrt Metro is that Longborn will include a PDL intended for use as PostScript is today, and it <cough>might</cough> be transparent to <cough>some</cough> useful degree. Guess they'll be getting back to us on that. In the mean time, the EU and Brazil and the third world generally (and U.S. municipalities and states) are evidently supposed to slow their exodus from Microsoft products, because MS will be sending some XML goodness their way. Some day. Sorta.
No sale.
As to what this all means for Adobe a few miles down the road, wouldn't it be cool if, as a defiant act of ritual suicide, the last person out of Adobe GPL-ed its products? Of course, it would suck to be an Adobe stockholder on that day.
Then again, isn't the purpose of MS's Metro announcement to hasten that day? I think the subliminal message is "Sell Adobe now." If so, I'll correct myself: it's not a hammer, it's a shiv.
LQ
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