Summary

While the applications of Office are not normally considered XML tools, they continue to add support for creating and editing XML. Most of the Office tools provide the capability of creating both simple XML documents based on a defined schema, as well as saving the full document in XML format. These documents maintain almost complete fidelity with the original.

Going forward, both Office 2007 and Open Office using XML as a native format opens up a number of opportunities for developers. As both use well-defined and open XML specifications, it is possible to create and edit these documents using standard XML tools, such as DOM, XPath, XSLT and XQuery. While the two have separate file formats, it should be possible to create tools that migrate between the two formats.

The next chapter looks at another Microsoft standard-XAML-and how you can use this new XML syntax to create rich, powerful user interfaces for your applications.