Foreword: A new era for XML, a new beginning for office documents -
By Jean Paoli
XML Architect,
Information Worker (Office, InfoPath) Groups,
Microsoft Corporation
Co-editor of the XML 1.0 Recommendation
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Redmond, October 2, 2003 It is my strong belief that Office 2003 XML represents a milestone in the history of electronic documents. It will help realize the full potential of XML. What you will read in this book is more than information about a new release of a product or about a particular technology. This is a book on re-inventing the way millions of people write and interact with documents. Finding a way to describe the meaning contained in a document has been a central focus of the XML community for nearly 20 years, back to when the primary technology was SGML. Traditionally, when a document is created, there is no information included about its actual content. All that is captured is the content's presentation – its size, whether the words are bold or italicized, the font, and so on. For example, a resume does not "know" it is a resume – it is just a collection of words that only has meaning when a human being interprets it a certain way. Those of us in the XML field have long believed that if we could provide a means to separate the actual meaning of the content from its presentation, then users would be able to "tag" parts of a document with labels that meant something to them. So in a resume, for instance, a user could tag the name, address, career goals, qualifications, and so on. More importantly, different types of documents (resume, healthcare report) would contain different sets of tags, each set appropriate to the kind of information its document type contains. In this way, documents of any kind could become a source of information as rich as a database, enabling rich search, processing and reuse. I believed in that vision when I joined Microsoft in 1996 and helped create the XML standard in the W3C. I collaborated with my colleagues from the SGML community to create that standard; our idea was to change the world of information. Very early on, XML took off in the industry like wildfire! Adoption started first on the server side, where information is traditionally processed and stored. The advent of XML Web services enabled the transfer of information from server to server and server to client, even in cross-platform environments. But until Office 2003 XML, a major piece of the information-processing infrastructure was missing. The desktop, the place where documents are created and analyzed by millions of information workers, could not easily participate in this exchange of information. And today's businesses thrive on information. Information is generated by many channels and exists in many forms: as raw data collected from operational systems, as content and documents that are published and shared, and in countless e-mail messages exchanged and stored locally by users throughout a company. With Office 2003 XML, Microsoft is addressing a fundamental concern that we have heard over and over again from our customers: Too often, business-critical information is locked inside data storage systems or individual documents, forcing companies to adopt inefficient and duplicative business processes. Needed data might be located in a database that employees aren't aware of or don't know how to access, in a text document that a co-worker has stored on her PC, or perhaps somewhere on the Internet. To address this issue, Microsoft is evolving the existing document paradigm for Office by broadly supporting XML in its products: Word, Excel, Access, FrontPage, Visio and a new XML-based forms product, InfoPath. Although there are well-established methods for storing and managing some types of data (for example, numerical data in databases), a significant portion of the information created in the business environment is not captured in any meaningful way. Workers everywhere generate reports, e-mail messages, and spreadsheets that contain vital, valuable information. But to reuse this information, these same workers may need to spend significant time searching for the appropriate files. They may also spend effort to re-key, cut and paste, or otherwise import the relevant information into another document. The way documents are created and handled limits the extent and ease of using information outside its original document. While there is a well-established methodology for data capture and validation in traditional data management, similar technology for gathering and managing the information contained in text-based reports and other common business documents has not been available. Originally, when my colleagues and I created XML, it was to solve this problem. XML enables businesses to capture all manner of business information in a way that maximizes its value. By facilitating reuse, indexing, search, storage, aggregation, and other practices more often associated with management of relational databases, XML brings the power of traditional data management to documents. But as significant as this new functionality is, there is an even greater and more innovative benefit of XML: Companies can create their own document type schemas, specific to their business, defining the structure and type of data that a document's data elements can contain. Support for custom-defined schemas is at the core of Microsoft's "XML Vision for the Desktop". It opens up a whole new realm of possibilities, not only for end users, but also for the business itself. Now organizations can capture and reuse critical information that in the past has been lost or gone unused. Bringing XML to the masses with Office 2003 is the result of more than 20 years' work in the field of structured documents, sharing ideas and dreams with many people whom it was an honor to know: -
The Microsoft Office team that believed in the "XML Vision for the Desktop" and, with its talent and experience for building user interfaces, designed and implemented the XML features in Office 2003. The team created a multitude of innovations that enabled those ideas and dreams to finally become reality for the information worker. -
My original Microsoft XML team and Adam Bosworth, with whom I jump-started the XML activity in Microsoft, building msxml in Internet Explorer and Windows and in the many server teams in Microsoft. -
The SGML and XML community that I have been a part of for so many years and that dreamed about a world where documents are semantically marked. This community is my extended family. -
The French and European scientific community and the INRIA laboratories, where I had the honor to meet, study and learn with incredible people such as Gilles Kahn, Jean-Francois Abramatic and Vincent Quint. -
The W3C and Tim Berners-Lee in particular, whom I had the honor to meet very early on and work with in W3C projects. And of course Dr. Charles F. Goldfarb. As the inventor of SGML and father of markup languages, Charles was uniquely qualified to create this book. It succeeds in communicating the novel underlying vision of Office 2003 XML while focusing on task-oriented, hands-on skills for using the product. Charles' co-author is the extremely gifted Priscilla Walmsley, W3C expert and author of Definitive XML Schema, a great reference and tutorial for the W3C XML Schema specification. I will always remember the happiness on Charles' face when I visited him a year ago to show him an early version of the product. It confirmed my belief that Office 2003 XML is finally bringing the original markup language vision to the desktop for millions of users. Enjoy the book! Jean Paoli
XML Architect,
Information Worker (Office, InfoPath) Groups, Microsoft Corporation
Co-editor of the XML 1.0 Recommendation
Redmond, October 2, 2003
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