Don't segment desktop XML

My vocal support for the next version of Microsoft Office has drawn heat in various quarters. Naysayers are convinced that Microsoft will find some way to cripple the XML capabilities of Word, Excel, and InfoPath. I've said they're wrong. These products do XML by the book. Even more importantly, they embody a vision that's eluded the Web services plumbers: people are SOAP endpoints too. Business processes do not exist in some separate universe in which XML packets flow untouched by human hands. We're not just input sources and output sinks. We have to be monitors and exception-handlers too. And when our ubiquitous personal productivity tools enable us to see and touch XML data, we can be.

Unfortunately, the power to see and touch XML data now seems a lot less ubiquitous than it did a couple of weeks ago. InfoPath will be bundled only with the volume-licensed Enterprise Edition of Office 2003. (It will also be available as a standalone.) Customer-defined schemas in Word and Excel will be supported in the Enterprise and Pro editions, but not in the Standard.

Microsoft argues that because Pro outsells Standard at retail, and because businesses prefer Enterprise, the stratification of the XML offerings is a customer-driven response. Really? I'm all for listening to customers, but I didn't hear many of them clamoring for the ability to define their own XML schemas. I suspect more than a few still have no clear idea what schemas are, how Office 2003 implements them, or why they matter. As it pushes this esoteric technology into the heart of Office, Microsoft isn't asking people where they want to go today. It is leading them, and rightly so. In Office 2003, XML is much more than a file format. It lays the foundation for what Office was always supposed to become: a ubiquitous platform for business applications.

There's the rub. Microsoft now sees schema support and InfoPath as an enterprise play that might — or might not — trickle down. I think they're an enterprise play too, but I reject the trickle-down theory. The most vibrant XML applications today are coming from the grassroots up, in the form of RSS-enabled Weblogs. The network of RSS producers and consumers, which is growing like gangbusters, has become a laboratory for leading technologists at IBM and Microsoft. Just this week, I joined them in an initiative to enable transmission of full-strength user-defined XML in RSS feeds. I don't know how best to use this capability, and neither does anybody else. But I'm sure that an open network with low barriers to entry is the only way to find out.