A disturbing documentary leaked by the
File Freedom Foundation. We think the Microsoft certified
seminar shown occured somewhere just outside London, UK in
the last month.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA7UR-Bb9QY

The speaker seems overly emphatic about compatibility of
some new kind of file XML file, which he describes as
the "x" files. Please do not show this to any casual
user of Microsoft Office or to any IT managers.

While the lack of skills of both the presenter, and whoever put this video together does make it disturbing, the fact that Office will now be using XML as the format for it's saved documents has been well publicized by Microsoft, and is great news for everyone who uses Office or other applications.

Up until now, Microsoft has used a proprietary format to save Office files. The entire format is not public, and so interaction with third party applications has been limited to what they have been able to figure out.

XML is an open standard, and is the direction that most development with databases is going. By using XML as the format, other apps can better interact with office docs, and will begin eliminating many of the compatibility problems we now face.

For me this means I will lose work which I do to parse office docs into other formats - but I'm really not that broken up about it!!

My advise for anyone else reading this post is...

Don't waste 6 minutes of your life watching this video, spend it getting started on understanding XML and what it can do.

You'll thank me later :)

Mike
EchoVue.com

Cross post. See also:
http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=58784

Locking this thread, if you see a need to comment on this, comment over on
http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=58784
instead.

kohlerwoorx: No more spamming our forums with cross posts please.

Jim Minatel
Senior Acquisitions Editor
Wiley Technology Publishing
WROX Press
Blog: http://wroxblog.typepad.com/
Jim's Book of the week: No book this week - Donate to the Red Cross!