Microsoft has XML up its sleeve

Chinmayee S

BANGALORE: Microsoft is playing the open standards card with its new Office 2003. Microsoft’s latest Office suite offers support for XML, which is fast emerging as the de facto standard for of formatting data that is used in back-end business processes or Web services.

"XML is parseable and it enables Office programs to communicate with almost any XML-enabled system", said Kamaljit Bath, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft.

Questions are being raised about the "openness" of Microsoft’s XML schema. The standard version of Microsoft Office 2003 allows XML documents to be saved only in Microsoft’s own XML schema, which could again lead to a lock-in problem.

"The XML format that Word uses adheres fully to the W3C XML 1.0 standard. The schema is Microsoft Word specific. The WordML schema fully represents a Microsoft Word document, representing every feature in Word as XML", says Brian Jones, Program Manager in Office, in a chat transcript hosted on the Microsoft site. And Microsoft has promised to publish the WordML schema (the XML schema that Word uses). "The WordML schema is already available in the Word XML Content Development Kit. So is the Excel XML toolkit," adds Brian.

However, allegations are rife that Microsoft’s XML schema is not fully documented and this means that a file saved as XML in Office 2003 does not necessarily make it compatible with rival Office suites. XML is a means to preserve the longevity of data. Experts feel if Microsoft had made full use of the parseability feature of XML, it would have served the purpose of XML better. "It isn’t as transparent as I expected it to be, though it isn’t entirely incomprehensible either. It would be readable by other programs but much of the formatting could be lost," says Sri Kumar, a developer and beta tester for Office 2003.

There’s one more catch to the XML support in Office. Microsoft is not offering its XML support to all versions of Microsoft Office. Full XML support is available only for Professional and Enterprise editions of Office 2003. The XML feature was included in the beta edition of Office 2003 and was one of the most-awaited features of the latest Office suite. Features such as custom-defined XML schemas are offered only with for Professional and Enterprise editions.

"XML in Office 2003 underlines Microsoft’s support for open standards", says Microsoft’s Kamajit Bath. But it looks like customers will have to live with proprietary file formats for a long time to come.