In an Ovum report on the technology, analyst Beth Barling says: "By separating data structure format from the way in which it is displayed (unlike HTML), XML enables data to be presented in multiple formats: for example, human-readable for display...
In a traditional Office-type application, all of that information can be stored on the user's desktop," Bishop said. He pointed to an earlier Microsoft technology, called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), that allows linking to one document from...
Adoption of XML means that for the first time, companies would have the option of bypassing proprietary Office file formats used for more than a decade. This "opening up" of Office could end Microsoft's lock on document file formats that have...
On top of the proposed document formats, the OASIS UBL group has released diagrams based on the unified modeling language (UML), a standard for software development, that give software engineers tools to build applications using XML documents.
The new software includes specialised extensions, such as tools for creating legal documents that used to be sold separately, plus integrated support for publishing documents in Adobe Systems' widespread portable document format (PDF).
People are using other tools - around scripting, PHP and all that. And as people do richer websites, we think the richness of what we've done there will go beyond the scripting-language-type approaches, which are fine.