Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 11:00 -0800, Nathan Young -X (natyoung - Artizen
> at Cisco) wrote:
> 
>>If we're talking about a document format to replace MS word documents,
>>we need much more than XHTML.  XHTML holds the content of the document
>>and provides (some) semantic information about that content.  To
>>replicate what a word doc can do and does do for most users, you have to
>>also specify how it's going to display and probably provide some
>>information to the application about how the editing experience should
>>be presented.
> 
> 
> I don't know why I'm even bothering with such a hopelessly subjective
> debate, but since everyone here seems to be so eager to crown XHTML for
> office formats, I'll pip up and say say:
> 
> Thank GODDESS for the OO XML project, Microsoft's partially reformed
> Office XML format team, and all others who are saving us from the abject
> horror of having to contemplate XHTML as an office file format.
> 
> Are you kidding me?
> 
> All arguments for XHTML everywhere eventually boil down to arguments
> that rather than 
> 
> <monty>
>   <python/>
> </monty>

no. you are missing the point. No one is stopping you from using 
whatever you want internally for your self, your department, your 
company or between companies if you want. But, if you want to let 
someone who is not necessarily in the loop see it, put it in a format 
that makes the most sense. I cannot see how that is MS Office or Open 
Office. Even worse is having a state impose it upon its citizens.

Say you are in charge of your states IT budget, how do you present your 
structure above to your citizens/vendors/buearocrats? Do you present 
your structure above as an MSOffice or OOWrite document?

> 
> I should write:
> 
> <div class="monty">
>   <span class="python"/>
> </div class"monty">
> 
> No bloody thank you.  Freedom from naming-by-committee is what drew me
> to XML in the first place.  I am not about to chuck that freedom for the
> very false comfort of a protean generic identifier.

have you /looked/ at the XML source for either of the office suites? 
Given that you can't do what you want in OOWrite and only painfully and 
with a bad UI in MSWord, why are you celebrating those formats?

As I keep trying to say, the reason they are the best choice currently 
is that they have the most user-friendly UI's for the people trying to 
simply get an assignment done.

best,
-Rob


> 
> And when I hear people preaching that people should stop writing new XML
> vocabularies, I just wonder who's been passing out the XHTML
> +Atom-is-all-you-need Kool-Aid.
> 
> I'll use XHTML for Web content, ODF for documents of more typical
> front-office style, Atom for Web feeds and information that is extremely
> easy to mistake for a Web feed, XBEL for links and Web resource
> directories (not XOXO-cum-XHTML, not OPML, not even Atom), and so on.
> 
> I have great tools and technologies such as RNG, XSLT, Schematron and
> more to manage diverse formats, and I see no reason to wallow in a
> narrow markup dungeon.
> 
>