Open XML links for 01-18-2007

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Google's support for the Open XML formats continues to improve. They recently started identifying DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files correctly, and now their ability to render Open XML documents is getting better. Brian Jones has some screen shots and other details.

George Kerscher on accessibility. I had the opportunity this week to meet George Kerscher, the secretary general of the Daisy Consortium. He was in town to attend a press event at the invitation of my colleague Reed Shaffner, and Gray Knowlton has more information and a link to a video interview with George. While his guide dog and companion Nesbitt napped nearby (Nesbitt has flown over a million miles, by the way), George talked about the upcoming DAISY translator project and how XML-based formats can enable accessibility.

Burton report brings out the name-callers. The recent report on document formats authored by Peter O'Kelly and Guy Creese, “What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications," has gained quite a bit of attention on various blogs this week. the Burton Group's Craig Roth discusses some of the unfortunate fallout of that publicity.

Is imitating a standard the same as supporting it? There has been quite a bit of debate around how various document formats implement vector graphics markup languages, and in studying this issue I've found myself a bit confused by the way ODF uses a combination of their own elements and attributes and SVG attributes. Jesper Lund Stocholm has a detailed look at this topic and the tradeoffs involved when a standard clones the syntax of another standard instead of directly re-using that standard.

Extracting comments from Open XML documents. Comments are a useful mechanism for collaborating on document creation, and sometimes it's useful to see what comments are included in a document without looking through any of the other content. Eric White has posted a LINQ-based code sample that demonstrates how to iterate through all of the Open XML documents in a folder and export their comments to a single XML file. This sample was based on a specific request, so if there are other Open XML tasks you'd like to see Eric demonstrate, post a comment and let him know.