« MovableType, Rebooted! | Main | Is it truly open? »
June 02, 2005
New Office will use XML as default format
I think we all have been expecting this for a while since Microsoft introduced the XML format in Office 2003. Now they're going full on and going to use XML (with zip compression) as their default Office format. It's certainly very interesting development and it'll make things hell lot easier for other software to be err compatible with MS Office. It'll be even more interesting how the other office suit will react on this news.
Not only portability with other office suites, but even a simple text indexing will now be easier. If you want to index the old MS Office document, you'd have to be able to extract the text first. This has somewhat become an industry by itself with tools costing tens of thousands dollars to do exactly this. With the new XML format it practically render those tools useless, well not straight away maybe but definitely less important.
Also worth noting that they picked the zip format for compression rather than the god-awful cab format. Will this trend to continue? Microsoft opening its own format and using more standard formats? Well I bloody hope so!
Now .. let's hope the PST format is next heh :) I'm dreaming I know, but hey who would have thought Microsoft will use XML format for their Office app 5 years ago?
Posted by vhadiant at June 2, 2005 09:47 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.hadianto.net/mov32/mt-tb.cgi/51
