How nice to be invited in here. Here's my WS comment for the day:
In the raging war between microsoft and massachussets, I hear a lot about XML being an "open enough" standard to provide the interop benefits sought by the commonwealth. This, in my opinion, is a case of trying to buzzword a problem away. So any WS afficionados who are all excited about MS Office XML being the default format for Office 12/Vista, take note:
(disclaimer: I don't pretend to know nearly as much about this as many others do)
-MS XML can contain binary objects that depend on MS Office and Windows.
Which is a pretty uncomfortable fact, w/r/t the Whole Point of webservices, viz: "to exchange data over computer networks like the Internet in a manner similar to inter-process communication on a single computer" (src). That is to say, if Office really wraps up your doc in well-formed XML, it's great 'cause you'll get some sort of response back from any WS that asks about it.
But if the response is -- more or less -- "There's no telling what's in here", then I don't see the big fat advantage. So before we all celebrate the use of XML in Office 12, maybe look closely at how it is used. In my opinion, it's mostly used to keep trendy.
(Yes, if you haven't figured it out I'm the resident raving anti-microsofty here at WS-Comments. Future posts will be more on-topic, though. I promise.)
