Dare Obasanjo: “Is it technically possible to create a ‘common shared office-XML dialect for the basics’ as Tim Bray suggests? It is. It’ll probably take several years (e.g. the Atom syndication format which is simply a derivative of RSS has taken over two years to come to fruition) and once it is done, Microsoft will have to ‘embrace and extend’ it to meet its primary goal of 100% backwards compatibility with its legacy formats.”
Dare also points out that Tim Bray is one of the chairs of the IETF Atom working group. Many in the RSS community called for a single format several years ago, and we all know how that turned out.
2 Comments
November 29, 2005 at 4:01 am
When Zhou Enlai (the former dictator of China) was asked his opinion of the French Revolution, he replied “It’s too early to say.” Same story with Atom: we don’t yet know whether it’ll become the main syndication format or whether we’ll continue to have several main formats.
November 29, 2005 at 2:22 pm
Spy Vs Spy aside for the moment, and following the thought experiment:
How much of a common word processing format subset is represented by HTML? How much isn’t? How much could be added by namespaced behaviors?
IOW, don’t we have one of these?
Simple minded, maybe, but given an environment in which SOA apps deliver the functionality needed with the web page (eg, blog editors), common component subsets will reduce the number of loss leaders each vendor has to support. Cost control is the mutual interest for all parties at the teapot.
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