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XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 01 August 2007
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover

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This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by
SAP AG http://www.sap.com
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HEADLINES:

* ITD Statement on ETRM v4.0 Public Review Comments
* Sun Plug-in Brings ODF Support to Microsoft Office
* Microformats in Google Maps
* Microsoft Releases Mac-Friendly Tools for Vista, Office 2007
* Where to Get ISO Standards on the Internet Free

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Statement on ETRM v4.0 Public Review Comments
Henry Dormitzer and Bethann Pepoli, ITD Statement

The U.S. Commonwealth of Massachusetts Information Technology Division
(ITD) announced a Final Version 4.0 release of the Enterprise Technical
Reference Model (ETRM), effective of August 1, 2007. Both Ecma-376
Office Open XML and OASIS OpenDocument Format for Office Applications
(Open Document) are named as "Open Formats" within this model, along
with plain text and HTML. The Commonwealth defines 'open formats' as
specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying
open standard, developed by an open community, affirmed and maintained
by a standards body and are fully documented and publicly available.
From the published statement: "The Commonwealth continues on its path
toward open, XML-based document formats without reflecting a vendor or
commercial bias in ETRM v4.0. Many of the comments we received identify
concerns regarding the Open XML specification. We believe that these
concerns, as with those regarding ODF, are appropriately handled
through the standards setting process, and we expect both standards to
evolve and improve. Moreover, we believe that the impact of any
legitimate concerns raised about either standard is outweighed
substantially by the benefits of moving toward open, XML-based document
format standards. Therefore, we will be moving forward to include both
ODF and Open XML as acceptable document formats. All comments received
are posted on this web site. Massachusetts is the first state to adopt
a policy encouraging open, XML-based document formats. The Commonwealth
has set the stage for a new and innovative way to ensure state
government operates most efficiently and effectively for its citizens.
The ETRM articulates a vision of a Service Oriented Architecture where
information can be shared, re-used and re-purposed based on XML
technologies. Document formats play a part in this vision by serving
as containers for the information rather than being the end goal. The
availability of open, standardized XML document formats without vendor
bias will move us further along in realizing this vision."

http://xml.coverpages.org/ITD-ETRMv40-Statement.html
See also the 2007-07-03 news story: http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2007-07-03-a.html

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Sun Plug-in Brings ODF Support to Microsoft Office
Tiffany Maleshefski, eWEEK Software Review

Sun's ODF plug-in can play an important role in broadening
interoperability between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office. Sun
Microsystems' ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office won't usher in an era of
universal document interoperability, but eWEEK Labs believes it is the
best option currently available for adding Open Document Format support
to Office's massive installed base. The plug-in, which Sun debuted on
July 4, 2007 in the form of a freely downloadable 30MB installation
package, enables users to read, edit and save ODF-formatted word
processor, spreadsheet, and presentation documents using the 2000, XP,
and 2003 versions of Microsoft Office. In contrast to the
Microsoft-sponsored translator, which was developed from scratch and
uses XSLT, a language for transforming XML documents into other XML
documents, Sun's plug-in is backed by proven document conversion code
from OpenOffice.org. However, file conversion with Sun's ODF plug-in
works differently than in OpenOffice.org, as the plug-in's import and
export filters work with Office's built-in text converter to get the
job done, yielding slightly different results than when I used
OpenOffice.org's converter alone. Overall, I found file conversion
in Word, Excel and PowerPoint to be on par with the document conversion
in OpenOffice.org, but, as with OpenOffice.org, conversion isn't
perfect. To test the Sun converter, I used an ODF-formatted word
processor, spreadsheet and presentation document, opened each file
in Office 2003 using the Sun ODF plug-in, made a small modification
to each file, and then saved the modified documents in both ODF and
Microsoft Office formats. I then printed out the original document;
the modified, ODF-formatted document; and the modified, Office-formatted
document for comparison. Ideally, all three would end up looking the
same, save for the small modifications I'd made. As it turned out,
conversion anomalies surfaced in both my test documents, but those
anomalies were different in the ODF- and Office-formatted documents.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2163405,00.asp
See also the download: http://javashoplm.sun.com/ECom/docs/Welcome.jsp?StoreId=8&PartDetailId=ODF-WIN-G-F&TransactionId=noreg
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Microformats in Google Maps
Gregor Rothfuss and Kevin Marks, Google Team Blog

"If you have spent any time in certain corners of the web, you will
have heard of Microformats: Clever uses of HTML that add
machine-readability to everyday web pages while preserving
human-readability. Microformats allow tools to make more sense of
your web pages, while not changing the visual appearance for visitors
to your site one whit. Today we're happy to announce that we are
adding support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results.
[hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people,
companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of
vCard (RFC 2426) properties and values in semantic XHTML. hCard is
one of several open microformat standards suitable for embedding in
(X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.] Why should you care about
some invisible changes to our HTML? By marking up our results with
the hCard microformat, your browser can easily recognize the address
and contact information in the page, and help you transfer it to an
addressbook or phone more easily. Firefox users can install the
Operator or Tails extension; IE or Safari users can use one of
[the supplied] bookmarklets. Using Microformats in your Maps API
application: You can get the benefits of microformats for your own
maps applications if you change your HTML to contain the necessary
hcard classes. In the simple example [here provided], we've changed
the infowindow to contain an hCard formatted address...

http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2007/06/microformats-in-google-maps.html
See also the Microformats.org web site: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-authoring

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Microsoft Releases Mac-Friendly Tools for Vista, Office 2007
Paul McDougall, InformationWeek

Microsoft has released trial versions of software designed to make
life easier for Mac enthusiasts that also use Microsoft products. The
file converter software lets users of the Mac version of Microsoft
Office open files created in Microsoft's new Office Open XML format
(native to the Windows-only Office 2007). The 'Microsoft Office Open
XML File Format Converter for Mac 0.2' software offers a number of
enhancements over existing converters, Microsoft said. Among them:
improved conversion of Word documents that contain XML content, inline
graphics, and hyperlinked graphics. It also adds support for opening
PowerPoint files stored in Office 2007's .pptx PowerPoint format, and
PowerPoint shows stored in the .ppsx format. The converter is aimed at
users of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Office v. X for
Mac, Microsoft said. The company warns that the software is a beta
release and "might be unable to convert all the data in Office Open XML
files." The second file available for download is a beta version of a
connectivity utility that lets Mac users access files on Windows XP
Professional-based PCs and PCs running the Business, Enterprise, or
Ultimate versions of Windows Vista. It will also connect Mac computers
to machines running Windows Server 2003.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201202328
See also the converter: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/download/Office2004/ConverterBeta_0_2.xml

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Where to Get ISO Standards on the Internet Free
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Articles

ISO/IEC standards can be purchased from ISO and usually from your local
national body. The lack of free online availability has effectively
made ISO standard irrelevant to the (home/hacker section of the) Open
Source community. However, many important ISO standards can be located
and downloaded for free legally if you know where to look. The first
source is ISO itself. Where an ISO standard is based on a pre-existing
external specification that is itself freely available, (a 'Publicly
Available Specification' in ISO-speak), the committee managing the
standardizing process can ask ISO to make it available on the Publicly
Available Standards webpage. This typically is used for standards that
come in from an external boutique standards body, but can come from
companies (e.g., MS C#) or even from individuals, as was the case with
standardizing Schematron. These standards do have some encumbrances:
you have a single user license and you may only retain one printed copy.
This is perfectly adequate for a single open source developer or student.
The ISO list contains the standards for programming languages (FORTRAN,
C, BNF, ECMAScript, C#, CLI, Eiffel, Ada profile), graphics (CGM),
networking and data interchange (OSI, X.25, parts of EDI, phone systems,
the basis of Unicode), data formats (ASN.1, parts of MPEG, .iso CD
format, JPEG2000, ODF), hardware (data cartriges, optical disks) some
of current and some of historical interest, and many standards
establishing common vocabularies and on conformance testing. Most
important for XML people, it has the growing list ISO DSDL schemas
languages (RELAX NG, Schematron, etc)...

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/08/where_to_get_iso_standards_on.html

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XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
EDS http://www.eds.com
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
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Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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