XML and Web Services In The News - 14 October 2003

XML in Microsoft Office Word 2003
Aaron Skonnard, MSDN Magazine
Microsoft Office Word 2003 introduces the 'Save as XML' command that produces WordML documents. Later, when you double-click on an XML document produced by Word, the Windows loader automatically associates the file with Word. WordML is powerful and flexible enough to capture all of the rich editing and formatting of a Word document with full round-tripping. The introduction of WordML is probably the most significant change in Microsoft Office Word 2003, but it's definitely not the only one. Developers can also attach custom XML Schema definitions and XSLT transformations to Word documents. Developers can mark up content with elements from the attached schemas, making it possible to inject meaningful business-specific markup that simplifies processing down the road. When you save a document in Word, it can validate the document against the attached schema and apply a custom XSLT transformation during the process.

OpenOffice.org XML Essentials: Using OpenOffice.org's XML Data Format
J. David Eisenberg, O'Reilly & Associates
The author provides draft content submitted to an open review process, published under a Creative Commons License. OpenOffice.org has as its mission "to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format." The OpenOffice.org file format is not simply an XML wrapper for a binary format, nor a one-to-one correspondence between the XML tags and the internal data structures. Instead, it is an idealized representation of the structure. This allows future versions of OpenOffice.org to implement new features or completely alter internal data structures without requiring major changes to the file format. Although the XML file format is human-readable, it is fairly verbose. To save space, OpenOffice.org files are stored in JAR (Java Archive) format. A JAR file is a compressed ZIP file that has an additional manifest file that lists the contents of the archive. If you, as a human, want to read the XML directly, you can unpack an OpenOffice.org file with any ZIP tool.
See also: the Creative Commons Project

Microsoft Nabs Vodafone for Mobile Web Partnership. Alliance Expected to Fracture Industry's Standards Efforts.
Mike Dano, RCR Wireless News
Microsoft Corp. and Vodafone outlined a new partnership to push mobile Web services, and company executives called on the rest of the wireless industry to follow their lead -- although they made no mention of existing industry efforts for Web services from the Open Mobile Alliance and the Parlay Group. Under the plans, the software and telecommunications giants plan to use the XML-based Web services architecture to allow developers to create applications that will work over both desktop computers and wireless devices. The companies said developers will be able to access and integrate mobile network services, such as messaging, location, authentication and billing into their applications. Industry analysts blasted the plan as a way to further fracture wireless industry standards efforts.

An Email User Interface to Web Services
Bryce Curtis and Jim Hsu, IBM developerWorks
Many portable devices let mobile users send and receive e-mail over a wireless network. These portable devices include Short Message Service (SMS)-enabled devices, two-way pagers, cellular phones with e-mail service, and portable networked laptops or Personal Data Assistants (PDA) with e-mail. Although these devices can send and receive e-mail messages, they cannot yet access and run Web applications and Web services. The Web application client is the predominant browser. However, as these portable devices become increasingly popular, using their e-mail capabilities to access the growing number of Web services and Web applications becomes increasingly beneficial. In this article, we detail an e-mail user interface that can interact with a Web application in a similar manner to that of a Web browser. In the architecture we propose, the HTML model combines with e-mail technology by routing incoming e-mails to a Web application server.

World Wide Web Consortium Releases XForms 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation.
XML Cover Pages
W3C has announced the publication of "XForms 1.0" as an approved W3C Recommendation, together with a CR-level "XForms 1.0 Basic Profile" and an introduction "XForms for HTML Authors." Written for authors and implementers alike, W3C XForms is the new generation of Web forms. XForms separate presentation and content, minimize round-trips to the server, offer device independence, and, using the XML Events specification, reduce the need for scripting.

Opsware and EDS Launch Data Center Markup Language (DCML) for Utility Computing.
XML Cover Pages
A Data Center Markup Language (DCML) for utility computing has been announced by Opsware and EDS. The XML-based DCML standard will support the data center environment in three areas: construction, management, and visibility. DCML is described as the first open language to describe data center environments, dependencies between data center components, and the policies governing management and construction of network and storage components.