RE: Word in 2010

["sbuckley" <sbuckley -at- onlinewriter -dot- com>]

There is talk of it, and some functionality of that type is presently
available.  By that I mean even Word 2003 has XML type support.  Here's a
link:
http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC011310811033&pi
d=CR061958171033.

(Since this link wraps, the entire link may not be hot when it reaches you.
If so, cut and paste it into your browser.)

So far Word seems to want to do it's own thing with XML and not really DITA
or similar standards.  I've seen this in other tools as well, such as Flare.

What I want, and what I think we all need, is a standard XML (DITA, DocBook,
etc.) and a tool that can take any standard XML.  That way we are tool
independent and not continually learning/training a new schema.

I think the world will change a lot in the next year or so.  I talked to
Flare and in upcoming versions they are planning to enable features to bring
in standards such as DITA.

Will a huge company like MS try to push their own XML?  Maybe, but currently
they are struggling to get their huge organizations (Word, Windows, etc.) on
some kind of tool that scales to their level and I don't think they are
really thinking about creating something of that nature for the rest of the
world.  But it's MS and today could be different.  Remember, the rest of the
world will probably never need to scale to the same amount of data as MS.

My advice currently is to get out of word processing tools for creation,
stick with an XML standard such as DITA, and you should be in a pretty good
position to move to other tools in the future with less rework than what we
as an industry have faced in the past.


-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+sbuckley=onlinewriter -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+sbuckley=onlinewriter -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of Wilhelm, Joel
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2007 2:40 PM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Word in 2010


Looking at the array of authoring tools that are out there for re-using
content, I wondered if Microsoft won't get in on the action at some
point. Has anyone thought about or heard about if M-soft will someday
build single-sourcing into Word? Content chunks, DITA capability, etc?
I'm wondering if it makes sense for smaller companies to wait a few
years and just see if M-soft will build a tool rather than shelling out
tons now for some small vendor tool.

Joel
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