Moving to XML

Another cautionary tail about software vendors

• Microsoft has a long history of 'embracing and extending' standards
  • Making small changes which cause other people's implementations to break.
  • Thus forcing people to use only their implementations.
• MS Word 2002 saves as 'HTML' and as 'XML'
  • When it saves as HTML, the HTML contains embedded 'XML' elements
  • In the 'XML', the attribute values are unquoted.
    • This is explicitly forbidden by the XML standards...
    • Standards compliant XML parsers can't parse this
    • Microsoft's own XML parsers can parse this
• Is this simply incompetence
  • Or is it 'embracing and extending'...?

Full text of this presentation | Table of Contents | No Frames Author: Simon Brooke | Copyright © 2001 Simon Brooke Slide 46 of 109