1.1. Office before XML Doug writes a monthly Sales Update article for the company newsletter that is widely read and appreciated for its up-to-the-minute data and inspirational prose. He types the article into Microsoft Word and saves it as a .doc file. He formats the article using different styles; for example, "Heading 1" for the title and "Heading 2" for the section headers. He also puts the author name and date in bold. (See Figure 1-1.) Figure 1-1. Doug's article, rendered in Word 
Doug then submits the article by email to Denise, who is responsible for compiling the newsletter. Denise opens all the article documents that are submitted and cuts and pastes them into a new Word document. She reassigns styles to the various article titles and section headers to make them consistent. Denise fixes any problems with the submissions, such as articles that are missing author names or dates. She does some general formatting, such as putting the company logo in the corner and changing the margins. She then saves her new .doc document in a directory named "newsletters" and distributes it by email to the entire company. Although this approach accomplishes the goal of getting the newsletter out, it has several drawbacks: rendered content When Doug created his article, his focus was on creating a formatted rendition. He applied styles so that a human reading the article could see that the author is "Doug Jones" and that the article date is February 3, 2004. A computer, though, would have no way of knowing this. As a result, there is no automated way to search the articles, say, for all articles whose author is Doug Jones, or all articles that were written after a particular date. In addition, there is no way to enforce rules for the article documents to make them consistent; for example, that at least one author is required, or that the title must be between 10 and 72 characters long. inflexible rendition Because the style information is tied directly to the content, there is a lot of repetitive manual reformatting. To change the style of all the author names, each author name needs to be changed separately. If the newsletter is to be presented in more than one way – for example, both as a printed document and as a Web page – the content of the document needs to be manually reformatted and stored redundantly. Templates could alleviate this problem somewhat, but only when the alternative renditions have similar structures. lack of integration with enterprise data Incorporating data from other parts of the organization requires either precise manual effort, or significant programming skills. For example, Doug needs to do careful, error-prone copying and reformatting to get the current sales statistics into his article every month. proprietary format The proprietary .doc format of Microsoft Word means that the text written by Doug, which may be a useful reference, is never integrated into a company database or content management system. It probably is abandoned on a file server somewhere. All of these issues can be addressed by using XML in Office. | 
