SD Times ran an article about how Sun is submitting the OpenOffice XML file formats to the OASIS standards body. Sun believes that OASIS will formally endorse the formats as a standard. In the same article, SD Times spoke with a Microsoft representative who said that they believe the Sun file formats are too limiting because they are based on a DTD rather than an XSD. Microsoft intends to release the Office 11 file formats as an open standard based on Schemas because they say that they can capture everything, including macros, in XML based on XSD.
Some folks, like Tim Bray (co-inventor of XML), are praising Microsoft for the new Office 11 format. Rightly so, it's going to be amazing what happens after millions of frustrated programmers are able to easily parse and create Microsoft Office documents without the suite itself.
I hope all this means that one day we'll be able to easily exchange and search through large repositories of documents. Further that we'll be able to take those documents and render them to different formats quickly and easily with a variety of tools.
9:20:37 AM 
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