The big news today is of course announced next Office's full deep XML-ization. I've read a dozen of enthusiastic postings already and decided not to bother my readers with another whoohoo-like post from another XML nerd. But what amazed me more than the announce itself (which was predictable) is the overall excitement about the news. Ranging from Scoble to Tim Bray - everybody seems to value ultimate XMLization of the next Office as "big cool news". Not a single critical post - what's the matter with you people? And even more:
I think another version or two after the upcoming Office, binary files will become completely obsolete and forgotten and won't be able to round-trip the latest features.says Wesner Moise (former Excel developer at Microsoft and overall smart guy).
Now that's amazing...
Overall, I feel it's great - but there's a caveat.. my question is what happens to the current formats (WordProcessingML, SpreadsheetML and DataDiagramML)
One thing that might be useful about the existing Xml formats is the single document approach -- writing a simple transform to WPML from xhtml is a fairly straightforward approach. And if there's ever a need to include a office document within the contents of a larger xml file, it's easy just to drop the Xml in -- in schema it would be adding an any element, reference the WPML namespace and you're good to go...
Due to the differing granularity of the Xml files (and since it looks that the XInclude rec. isn't used for the "relationships" between files within the zip) it looks like it would be difficult to do transforms and inclusions in other Xml files.
maybe for alot of solutions requiring formatting information, including the WPML namespace is overkill when perhaps just xhtml will do very nicely.-- and you still can reference the external zip files -- but it seems that a single-data document approach is kinda nice in certain situations.