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Making XML useful to ordinary mortals
Ed Tittel
XML is all too often celebrated for its great abstract representational capabilities, and the many applications to which it has been put. But XML syntax, structures, and semantics still tend to elude the common office worker, who may not be interested in climbing a formidable learning curve just to be able to capture or represent data in an open-ended, easily accessed, and infinitely transmutable form. Whereas application or content developers hear such collections of buzzwords and say "Wow, cool!" ordinary office workers hear such collections of buzzwords and think: "Huh? This has nothing to do with me!"
In its upcoming release, Microsoft may be changing this attitude on both sides of the developer/ordinary user street. Jon Udell wrote an excellent story for InfoWorld Online on November, 14, 2002 entitled "Web Services Development: Jean Paoli on XML in Office 11" that presages some interesting changes and capabilities afoot. But first, some explanations: Jean Paoli is not only Microsoft's XML architect for the upcoming version of Office (sometimes called Office 11; hence those terms in the story's subtitle), he's also a founding member of the group of markup language gurus who helped to created XML from scratch in the late 1990s. Click here for the original story.
One powerful notion that Paoli has dead on is that while many ordinary users may not understand XML Schemas or DTDs per se, they do understand the kinds of templates that have long been associated with Office documents of various types. From a purely formal perspective, developers understand that the right transformations can make formal XML document descriptions -- that is, DTDs, XML Schema, or RELAX NG documents -- from Office template files (and vice versa). The power of this approach is that many ordinary users intuitively understand how to define and use such templates, and need not even be aware that XML is managing how such descriptions are stored and used in the background.
Microsoft has been promising a meaningful upgrade in how Office uses XML for some time now, but Udell's interview puts some shape and substance into those promises. What lies ahead sounds not only powerful and interesting (as is true for so many XML applications, the "gee whiz" factor sometimes seems more important than usability), but also eminently useful for users of all kinds. Here's some of what to expect in the forthcoming release of Office:
- Back end data processing tools that support XML -- including databases and ERP systems -- can deliver XML as output. In the next release, raw XML data can be dropped right into Excel to use its analytical tools while preserving the XML mappings and definitions unchanged.
- All Office tools become XML editors, to create documents (Word), to "gather information in structured form" (XDocs), to analyze data (Excel), or to build presentations (PowerPoint). All tools can still do everything they've always been able to do, but can now handle XML data as a type of native, recognized format.
Since Office also handles the formal XML modeling of data using DTDs or XML Schema programmatically, it creates a much easier way to capture and encode such information than by creating document descriptions per se (instead, Office creates such descriptions from the documents or data themselves, but can also work with external data sources already based in XML).
It should be very interesting to see how well this works in practice, and what kinds of interesting uses to which the resulting formal data models can be put. Although it won't take an XML guru to build such descriptions any longer, XML gurus out there will surely find lots of fascinating ways to put those descriptions to work once they become broadly available.
About the Author
Ed Tittel is a principal at LANWrights, Inc., a network-oriented writing, training, and consulting firm based in Austin, Texas. He is the creator of the Exam Cram series and has worked on over 30 certification-related books on Microsoft, Novell, and Sun related topics. Ed teaches in the Certified Webmaster Program at Austin Community College and consults. He a member of the NetWorld + Interop faculty, where he specializes in Windows 2000 related courses and presentations.
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