Simon St. Laurent: For some reason, news.com seems hung up on the issue of what schema Microsoft is using. News.com doesn't seem to grasp that you can do lots of things with XML with or without a schema, and perhaps the most powerful feature of Office 11 is that you can use it to process documents using your own schemas, applying Microsoft's tools to formats you (not Microsoft!) control directly. 

I still think there are two sides to this story.  On one side, the ability of MS tools to adapt to formats that users can describe will be an incredible step forward.  On the other hand, this doesn't explain an unwillingness to working with others to describe the semantics that PowerPoint 11 uses to capture a pie chart.

See also parts 1 and 2.

  8:36:00 PM   Comment