Jean Paoli - Co-creator of XML, part I

The Discussion

• 

  Very cool video!
  
  And I liked the part where he talked about Brussels because that is where I live  (well, nearby) and our company develops for the government (education) using... a lot of XML! (especially Web Services lately, I gave some demos to the responsible people and they were VERY impressed!).
  On our next meeting, I'll definitely tell about this video!
  
  In 2005 we also have to build a lot of IVR and VoIP telephony applications... and I was wondering: is Microsoft doing anything with VoiceXML, CCXML etc.?
  
  Now that we are on the subject, it would be a very good idea to have some videos on Channel9 about VoIP, and what's available to build a PBX (just like Asterisk on the linux platform!), IVR systems (including TTS and speech recognition), etc.
  
  We are speaking about tens of thousands of users for which we have to develop VoIP services, and as a .NET developer, I'd love to promote a .NET solution running on the Windows platform, but I don't even know what's available and possible, because 90% of the information on the Internet refers to *nix solutions (or FreeBSD etc...)!!!  What struck me even more is that for many telephony boards (such as the interestingly priced T1/E1 boards), there aren't even windows drivers available!!!
  
  My co-workers and myself have the feeling that there are 2 areas where the linux platform has a near-monopoly: open source PBX/telephony applications, and software BGP routing (Zebra/Quagga).  Let these be 2 things that we need to implement and develop for, and you can understand that I (as a Windows-developer) am very unhappy!!!  Please take appropriate action to stop the dictatorship of linux in these areas, really the last thing I want is having to use linux for my job!
  
  To the point:
  
  * Asterisk open source PBX => alternative for windows??? + what is available for .NET developers (API's, etc... - NOT commercial solutions!) to build CTI & IVR solutions ourselves?
  
  * Zebra/Quagga BGP4 daemon => nothing available for Routing and Remote Access in Windows 2003 Server? (I read on the Microsoft website that it is possible to add routing protocols / plugins to RRAS, such as for BGP routing, but nobody seems to have done it??? - why doesn't Microsoft provide it by default?)

• 

  This is really good - the guy is really motivated and interesting to listen to.  This is awesome...
  
  Keep up the good work! 
  

• 

  Very Good Video.
  
  I'd like Jean to expand a little more on the division between the document design and structure - he mentioned it a little, but I think there's more exploration that needs to be done for XML to reach its potential.
  
  In my experience in web dev, the biggest problem with creating a library of structured documents is the quality of output from the content creators, who are usually non-technical. You can get them to fill in fields, drop downs, and text boxes, so I understand how apps such as access forms and excel spreadsheets lend themselves to xml data. However, a word doc situation is different. As soon as you give them an opportunity to format text with fonts, colors, etc, any standard structure seems to fly out the window.
  
  Have you noticed how a lot of office workers use word like it's a dtp app? How do you get these users to give up formatting, and just enter source?? You can create as many templates as you like, but if you force them to use one, chances are they'll be back asking you if you could just add a way they can add 24 point blinking red verdana type to your carefully designed, subtle blue and black template.
  
  I understand why the content creators think like this. For years, they were given free reign to design however they wanted in these very powerful apps, such as Word, and now we are asking them to stop and think about the data. How do we change their mindsets?
  
  Oh, and the 24 point blinking red verdana text thing was a true story. That Marketing Manager nearly put me into therapy.

• 

  It's great to hear about XML and WordML from one of the principal architects of the XML format!
  
  This video applauds moving from a third party format to WordML but not one mention of moving from WordML to, say, XHTML. Again, Don Box himself began writing an XSL transform and stopped. What can we say about this folks? Any applause?
  
  I am watching what Microsoft does. Microsoft had a beta XHTML XSL transform for Office and the last time I checked it is gone.
  

• 

  rasx:::
  
  If it's true what you say about not being able to locate Microsoft's XHTML XSL transform, I wouldn't be surprised if it was subsequently replaced with a new programming protocol called XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) which will be incorporated as part of the next version of Visual Studio after whidbey codenamed ORCAS to be incorporated with the use of Longhorn.
  
  ...all these MS codenames makes one sound like king of the Geeks...
  
  Brice Richard
  
  (Ref: see http://www.dnjonline.com/articles/backend/codenames.asp)

• 

  Brice It wrote:

  rasx:::
  
  If it's true what you say about not being able to locate Microsoft's XHTML XSL transform, I wouldn't be surprised if it was subsequently replaced with a new programming protocol called XAML

  
  
  XAML is great but that is still a Microsoft-ward direction. I am unable to see how XAML replaces XHTML.
  

• 

  Hi,

  Using Open XML Format SDK 1.0 (Web application : C # or VB.Net), I want to build a file .docx from several other files .docx, each one constitutes a part of the final document. For example:
  Header.docx (which contains the Header of the final document - text and images, MailMerging fields...)
  footer.docx (which contains the footer of the final document - text and images, MailMerging fields...)
  Paragraph-1.docx (which contains the paragraph 1 of the final document - text and images, MailMerging fields...)

  some one have an idea?

  Thank you.