Open Document Formats – XML to you and me

This is one of the areas I am going to be looking at so its good news that there has been a recent flurry of activity around it.  here are some of the more important links. 

The debate was started by the EC report into this topic which is summarised here the full report can be found here.   One of the nice things about this report is that its been reviewed by Microsoft and Sun, and their comments on it, (at least those they made public), are also published.  Tim Bray, a man with some credibility in this area, (now working for Sun), describes his meeting with the EC team here.  John Udell writes up his views on the EC report here.  Dare Obasanjo responds to Tim Bray here.  

Then the thread starts to drift a bit, but Tim Bray also talks about his views on how the OpenOffice team have used XML, he is impressed!  And a snippet on how Microsoft have used XML in Office 2003, he is less than impressed!  Tim also talks about the use of custom schema’s and concludes they are not a good idea, (Microsoft implement them in Office 2003, OpenOffice don’t).  Jean, (a MS employee), gives his point of view, Jean like Tim is also a member of the team that created XML.