Top open source lawyer blesses new terms on Microsoft’s XML file format
With Office 2003, Microsoft created an xml vocabulary for representing office documents. (Try it out by select xml document in the Save as type drop down menu when saving a word document, then open the resulting file in a text editor such as textpad or dreamweaver.) Up until recently this vocabulary has been proprietary in nature. Apparently that is about to change as Microsoft is making the vocabulary available to all developers with little or no strings attached. This could lead to a separation between the format for saving office documents and the authoring environments used to create and modify them. Top open source lawyer blesses new terms on Microsoft’s XML file format describes some of the technical and legal issues involved.