piblog

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Fri, 21 Feb 2003

Microsoft's InfoPath #
Infoworld columnist Jon Udell has recently been given a sneak preview of Microsoft Office 11. He specifically has been examining the roll XML will have in it.

InfoPath (formerly XDocs, originally NetDocs) is the newest application in Office and there has been a lot of speculation as to how standards compliant it will or will not be. Mr. Udell has written several articles recently on Office 11 including yesterday's the Ten things to know about XDocs.

After reading it, I too am excited about the possibilities of the application, but my Microsoft bigotries hold me back from too much elation. He also acknowledges that he has only seen it running, but has not had a chance to kick the tires on his own.

Microsoft apparently will be marketing it intially as a forms application, which is not too exciting, but Mr. Udell sees it as "a power tool for building applications that view, edit, and transform XML data" for developers. That would be pretty cool. However, forgive my unwillingness to give Microsoft any credit without a caveat, but this whole project seems very similar to XForms. Why not throw their muscle behind an established standard and promote its acceptance? I know that XFroms is not perfect, but it is already here. Why must Microsoft "embrace and extend" yet another concept strictly to create more interest in Office 11? I guess I just answered my own question. |/xml|