[Sigia-l] Share and share alike

[Conal Tuohy]

My first post to this list! 

I have to extract a simple markup from WordML for a client so I've read a little bit about it recently. I haven't read the schema, and for this particular job I don't think I'll have to.

Of course it's possible to extract content from a WordML document without knowledge of the WordML XML Schema. I don't know a lot about patent law but my reading of the claims[1] in the patent is that the patent would not affect anyone processing an instance document which happens to conform to that schema, so long as they don't use an (XSD) schema to do so. Maybe someone else with a legal background might dispute that interpretation.

To my mind, there's much more to be said for using Word 2003 as an editor application than for any other purpose (e.g. for printing or browsing). Personally, I'm not at all interested in using Word for anything other than editing text, so I'm not that concerned with being able to generate new Word documents, only extraction from WordML.

In which case there are still a lot of possibilities. For instance, I have a little XSL stylesheet to "slurp" plain text from a WordML file right here:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
	<xsl:output method="text"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

OK maybe it could use a little work :-)

It seems that these days MS are making more use of patents to exploit their monopoly, but my 2c says it's the same old domination in a new technical form. 

Cheers!

Con

1. http://v3.espacenet.com/textclam?DB=EPODOC&IDX=EP1376387&QPN=EP1376387