Net Buzz with Richard Wiggins | 4

No, it's right on target. It's exactly the "open secret" that users of SGML have been enjoying for over a decade, and users of systems like TeX for double that time: complete platform independence and portability. What's interesting is the way the whole proprietary data format stuff is being turned on its head.

Business is just beginning to take on board the idea that maybe proprietary data formats -- which they designed originally to *prevent* you using a competitor's program -- are actually stifling business, rather than encouraging it. Given the choice between a system which binds me to one maker's software at a monopoly price, and a portable system I can use anywhere anytime, I know which one I'd buy.

The open secret is that this technique has been known for decades, but the marketing and finance people would freak at the thought of "giving away" data formats. It genuinely never occurred to them that the real winners are the companies who build better systems, rather than the ones who nail the user to the deck. Lots of companies failed to see this coming, including some of the very biggest. Microsoft have obviously spotted the opportunity, and XML just happens to be a very convenient platform to do it on.

Smart companies have known this for 10 years and are now going to reap the benefits. Companies who still think that storing their text in visual form only (most wordprocessor / desktop publishing file formats) is a cool idea may find themselves with a large legacy conversion requirement. Quick stop-gap: stop saving those Word documents as .doc files and start saving them as .rtf (which can be converted to SGML, roughly but fairly reliably). Beware of "Save-as-HTML": it falls into the category of non-conformant files mentioned above. (It even misleads about its origins in the DocType declaration: it says it conforms to HTML 2.0 but in fact it doesn't necessarily do anything of the sort.) It's just not good business to fail to protect your information base.

XML is going to provide an unequalled opportunity to break the mold of the "wordprocessor mindset." Under that ethos, you typed stuff for one purpose only: to print it. Wordprocessors -- in the main -- are usable for that one purpose only: a heading is only identifiable visually by a human, to the wordprocessor it's just a bunch of letters in a font. XML/SGML/HTML provide the ability to say why these letters are where they are, what role they play in the document. When markup captures why we use text in particular ways, documents can be used for multiple purposes -- printing, the Web, databases, searching, Braille -- and can still be re-used in other forms and by other people regardless of the computing environment. This all holds true because SGML (in which HTML and XML are grounded) is a non-proprietary format.