content/xml/xml_advocacy.html - openoffice-org - Git at Google

 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
 <HTML>
 <head>
 	<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
 	<TITLE>The StarOffice XML based file format</TITLE>
 	<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="StarOffice 6.0  (Win32)">
 	<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Daniel Vogelheim">
 	<META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="20010803;16470900">
 	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Daniel Vogelheim">
 	<META NAME="CHANGED" CONTENT="20010821;15101200">
 	<STYLE>
 	<!--
 		@page { margin: 2cm }
 		P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; text-align: justify }
 		H1 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; font-family: "Arial", sans-serif; font-size: 16pt }
 		H2 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; font-family: "Arial", sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal }
 		H3 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; font-family: "Arial", sans-serif; font-size: 12pt }
 	-->
 	</STYLE>
 </head>
 <body>
 <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-top: 0.42cm; page-break-after: avoid"><FONT FACE="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT SIZE=5>The
 StarOffice XML based file format</FONT></FONT></P>
 <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-top: 0.2cm; margin-bottom: 2cm; page-break-after: avoid">
 <FONT FACE="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT SIZE=3>To boldly go where no
 office suite has gone before</FONT></FONT></P>
 <H1>1Introduction</H1>
 <P>StarOffice 6.0 and OpenOffice.org use a new, XML based file format
 for all its documents. The constituent parts of an office document,
 content, layout and meta information, are stored as XML streams
 inside a ZIP file, along with embedded graphics and objects contained
 in the document.</P>
 <P>Before musing on the technical virtues and uses of the XML based
 file format, it should be noted that the format as well as the
 OpenOffice.org application, which serves as a reference
 implementation for the format, are available under a GNU license.
 This open and free licensing guarantees that you are not at the mercy
 of a single company for improvements and fixes of the format or its
 supporting software, thus providing very strong protection for all
 investments and efforts you put into this format. Additionally, Sun
 aims at standardizing the format, thus providing any interested
 parties with a way to participate in the evolution of the format.</P>
 <P>The next chapter will introduce several features of the XML
 format, followed by a chapter in which benefits can be derived from
 these features for various types of users. Finally, a conclusion will
 be presented.</P>
 <H1>2How It Works &#150; The Means</H1>
 <P>This chapter will highlight several technicalities of the XML
 based file format. The following chapter will then show how to put
 these into use.</P>
 <H2>2.1Separation of Content, Layout, and Meta Information</H2>
 <P STYLE="font-style: normal">An office document contains content,
 for example the text of a letter, or the data in a spreadsheet, along
 with layout information, which describes how the content should look
 like. Also part of document is meta information like who edited a
 document and how it is called, or additional information such as
 images or embedded objects. To a user, these are inseparable parts of
 a single document. But for processing the document, it makes sense to
 separate them such that they can be read, interpreted and modified
 independently of each other. To facilitate this, the StarOffice XML
 file format stores content, layout, meta information, images and
 embedded objects in separate streams of a ZIP based package file. The
 whole file contains the whole document, the individual streams
 contain the constituent parts of the document.</P>
 <H2>2.2Standards Based</H2>
 <P>When creating the XML based file format, we tried to gain as much
 as was possible from related standards. The very use of XML is one
 example. The ZIP format we use for packages are in widespread use.
 Many elements and attributes are borrowed from HTML, XSL-FO, XLink,
 Dublin Core, or SVG. For Math, we use MathML. This allows easy
 transformation from and into those formats, and also it allows people
 to quickly understand our format, if they are already familiar with
 those formats we make use of.</P>
 <H2>2.3Uniform Representation of Formatting and Layout Information</H2>
 <P>The StarOffice and OpenOffice.org applications distinguish between
 formatting through styles and <I>direct</I> formatting, which means
 applying formatting directly to text or cell ranges. In the XML
 format, these different ways to format a document use the same
 style-based representation. The <I>direct</I> formatting is
 automatically converted into <I>automatic styles</I>,  which is a
 style-based formatting equivalent of the <I>direct</I> formatting the
 user applied to the document.</P>
 <H2>2.4Structured Format</H2>
 <P STYLE="font-style: normal">A primary design goal of the XML format
 was to represent all structured information contained in an document
 as XML structures, thus making the document fully accessible to
 standard XML tools.  This is a quite different solution to, for
 example, an XHTML/CSS solution, where all CSS formatting information
 is encoded in a text-only format. This way, all layout information
 appears as a single string to an XSLT processor, making it very hard
 to process the layout information in any way.</P>
 <H2>2.5Idealized Format</H2>
 <P><SPAN STYLE="font-style: normal">Our XML file format is a properly
 designed file format, as opposed </SPAN>to a mere XML dump o<SPAN STYLE="font-style: normal">f
 core structures with all their implementation details and
 limitations. The documents are represented in a way which is easy to
 understand and use, and not in a way which is easy to implement. This
 allows the format to abstract application peculiarities and therefore
 the format may also be used by applications other than StarOffice and
 OpenOffice.org. Throughout the development of the format, great care
 was taken to make sure the file format is easy to process. Also, the
 idealized representation makes it easier to improve the StarOffice
 and OpenOffice.org applications without having to make major changes
 to the format itself.</SPAN></P>
 <H2>2.6Common Format Across All Office Applications</H2>
 <P STYLE="font-style: normal">The same format is used across all
 office applications. Similar concepts in the different applications
 always use the same XML representation. For example, spreadsheet
 tables and word processor tables share a common XML representation,
 even though their implementations and limitations are quite
 different. This has great advantages when processing or generating
 StarOffice files: The same code works for all applications. For
 example, a single XSLT style sheet can process both spreadsheets and
 text documents.</P>
 <H2>2.7Open For Extensions and Supplemental Information</H2>
 <P STYLE="font-style: normal">Arbitrary XML attributes may be
 attached to style information and will be preserved when editing such
 a modified file with StarOffice. Because all formatting information
 is uniformly represented as styles, and because any document content
 can be formatted using styles, this allows arbitrary information to
 be attached to any part of the document content. Further means to add
 supplemental information, such as allowing complete streams to be
 part of the packages, may be added.</P>
 <H1>3What You Gain &#150; The Ends</H1>
 <P>The previous chapter has highlighted several features and
 mechanisms of our new file format. This chapter will look at how this
 helps different groups of users.</P>
 <H2>3.1Office Users</H2>
 <P>To the user of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, the main benefits
 may be summarized as increased robustness, openness, document
 longevity, and version interoperability. In additional, the user will
 gain additional benefits as the document processing and additional
 solutions described in the following chapters become reality.</P>
 <H3>Increased Robustness</H3>
 <P>To a user, their own documents are usually valuable resources,
 into which lots of time and effort has been invested. What happens,
 if through an error in the used hardware or software used, the
 documents become corrupted? With a binary format, the user is at the
 mercy of the original application: If it can still read or recover
 the document, all is well. If not, the document is lost.
 </P>
 <P STYLE="font-style: normal">XML makes it easy to ignore and
 tolerate problems in the documents, so the likelihood of lost
 documents is reduced. Additionally, the human readable/editable
 nature of XML allows advanced users or service personnel to inspect
 corrupt files and restore the documents, even without specialized
 tools or very much in-depth knowledge.</P>
 <H3>Document Archiving</H3>
 <P>For some users, long-term storage of documents is important. With
 binary file formats, documents can be read only as long as the
 supporting application as well as the system it runs on exists. XML,
 being a text based and human readable format, allows files to be read
 even if the original application (or the OS, or the hardware it ran
 on) are not available anymore. Additionally, the thorough
 documentation of the format allows the files to be fully interpreted.</P>
 <H3>Version Interoperability</H3>
 <P>A well-known problem with office documents is a file format
 versioning problem: New versions of the office suite usually come
 with a new version of a file format, which the older version don't
 know about. To be able read the newer documents, users find
 themselves forced to upgrade their application.</P>
 <P>Contrast this with an XML based format: XML is extensible, making
 it easy to to add new features to the format without loosing the
 ability to read older files. Older applications will simply ignore
 the new (and, to them, unknown) content, thus reading the newer files
 as well as they can. The result is a high degree of forwards and
 backwards compatibility.
 </P>
 <H3>Documented and Transparent File Content</H3>
 <P>With the XML file format, the user can finally inspect the content
 of files that are being sent or received. If yet another macro virus
 threatens your organization, a simple combination of unzip and grep
 allows you to check for suspicious content. If you want to make sure
 that files you send to other people don't contain sensitive
 information, then now you can simply look at them. Or if you need to
 quickly find a certain document, just use Unix grep or the Windows
 Explorer context menu  to search through the meta information, which
 are stored as plain text.</P>
 <H2>3.2Document Processing and Developers</H2>
 <P>Advanced users and developers may want to make use of the new
 freedom the StarOffice XML file brings them, and use and process
 StarOffice files with other tools and applications. There are several
 advantages for them:</P>
 <H3>Standards Based and Openness</H3>
 <P>The StarOffice XML file format relies on many standards in
 addition to the actual XML standard itself: It makes use of elements
 and attributes from HTML, XLink, XSL-FO, Dublin Core, and SVG.
 Developers familiar with these can easily pick up on the StarOffice
 format. Also, a developer has a wide choice of tools and code
 libraries for many programming languages that allow processing and
 manipulation of XML or ZIP files.</P>
 <P>This use of established standards is particularly useful for
 making office documents available outside of traditional PC
 applications. For example, by transforming our office documents into
 HTML, you can make them available through the World Wide Web. Similar
 transformations are  into WAP or XSL-FO are possible.
 </P>
 <P>An example of transforming our documents into HTML is available on
 the OpenOffice.org website, and another one is available through the
 xml.com website (see reference at the end of this paper).
 </P>
 <H3>Easy Import and Export of Other File Formats</H3>
 <P>Import and export of other '<I>foreign</I>' file formats can be
 accomplished by converting the document into the XML file format.
 This approach has several advantages:</P>
 <OL>
 	<LI><P>The XML file format provides the developer with a clean,
 	documented target.</P>
 	<LI><P>Due to XML's human readability, debugging becomes much
 	easier.</P>
 	<LI><P>The file format and the StarOffice API hide the details of a
 	particular office version, so the developer doesn't have to
 	recompile and update the import/export component for every new
 	version of StarOffice.</P>
 	<LI><P>Several XML based import or export components may be chained
 	to each other. This can be used to convert between two
 	non-StarOffice formats.</P>
 	<LI><P>Import and Export components can be integrated into
 	StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, or they can be used stand-alone. In
 	the latter mode, they could be used e.g. for batch conversion of
 	many files. Also, they can be used to view StarOffice XML documents
 	without having to start the full StarOffice application.</P>
 </OL>
 <H3>Leverage Available Infrastructures</H3>
 <P>Being based on XML and ZIP, the StarOffice file format can be used
 with the growing number of widely available tools that can process
 these formats. Examples are:</P>
 <OL>
 	<LI><P>XML viewers and editors</P>
 	<P>Any of the available XML viewers can be used to examine the
 	document content. XML Editors can be used to manually make changes
 	to the document content or its layout.</P>
 	<LI><P>XML transformations</P>
 	<P>XML transformation tools and libraries, such as XSLT engines or
 	XPathScript (Perl), can be used to automatically edit, modify or
 	generate StarOffice documents.</P>
 	<LI><P>XML Databases</P>
 	<P>There is a growing number of XML aware database and storage
 	products. These may be used to store, index, query and manipulate
 	StarOffice documents.</P>
 	<LI><P>ZIP tools</P>
 	<P>With the package mechanism using the well-known ZIP format,
 	standard ZIP tools may be used to change the package content. For
 	example, using any ZIP tool, embedded graphics can be changed from
 	low resolution to high resolution ones before giving a document to a
 	print shop.</P>
 </OL>
 <H2>3.3Solution Providers</H2>
 <P>A generic office suite may not be the right solution for everyone.
 Often, significant improvements to productivity can be achieved by
 using custom software solutions tailored exactly to the requirements
 of a particular organization. StarOffice and OpenOffice.org can
 become part of such a solution, supplying office functionality as
 part of an larger, fully integrated package. Solution providers who
 want to integrate StarOffice or OpenOffice.org into their software
 will find the XML file format along with the open StarOffice API to
 be the enabling features for this.</P>
 <H3>StarOffice as Editor Component</H3>
 <P>The StarOffice API enables the use of StarOffice as an editor
 component. In this mode of operation, StarOffice may appear as an
 edit area within the custom application, controlled through the API.
 The custom application only needs to represent its own data in the
 StarOffice XML file format and hand it to the StarOffice component.
 When the editing is done, the custom application can then convert the
 XML data stream back into its own, native format for storage or
 further processing.</P>
 <H3>Search Engines / Knowledge Management Systems</H3>
 <P STYLE="font-style: normal">The use of XML makes office documents
 accessible to search engines and more advanced knowledge management
 systems. Since the full document structure is available as XML,
 knowledge management system could easily extract or value document
 content based on how or where it is contained in the document.</P>
 <P STYLE="font-style: normal">Search engines can usually been
 configured for different file types. To index and search StarOffice
 XML files, all that is necessary is to teach the search engine to run
 the venerable 'unzip' command on each file before processing it.</P>
 <H3>Document Management</H3>
 <P STYLE="font-style: normal">StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are
 ideally suited for integration into document management systems.
 Here, a key feature is the ability to attach additional data to
 documents or parts of documents. A document management system can use
 this to include additional information into the documents while still
 keeping the documents fully editable by the user. As detailed above,
 StarOffice and OpenOffice.org may additionally be used as editing
 components inside the document management system.</P>
 <H3>Partial Editing and Two-way Conversion</H3>
 <P>Custom applications may want to modify or update office documents
 based on specific data or computations. XML makes it easy to identify
 specific parts of a document and to replace them. The separation of
 content and layout further helps this because it allows changing one
 without having to change the other.</P>
 <P>A similar approach is to extract data from a StarOffice document
 and process it in some way. Then, merge the new data into the
 document again, or just recreate the document based on the new data.
 Such back-and-forth conversions are simplified by XML's nature, and
 the content/layout separation.</P>
 <P>This technique could be used to support StarOffice documents (or
 parts of documents) on resource constrained devices, such as PDAs.
 </P>
 <H3>StarOffice as Layout Engine</H3>
 <P><SPAN STYLE="font-style: normal">At the end of the data processing
 chain, a </SPAN>custom application may need to present data to users
 or generate printable documents, summaries and reports. When using
 StarOffice, this can be achieved by converting the presentation data
 into the StarOffice XML file format, and loading it into StarOffice
 for layout and printing. This way, the full power of StarOffice can
 be leveraged for professionally looking documents without having to
 recreate the entire formatting and layout logic. Once again, the
 separation of content and layout helps, as it allows painless
 generation of the plain content data, which can then be combined with
 professional, artistic layout information.</P>
 <H1>4Conclusion</H1>
 <P>The upcoming StarOffice 6.0 and OpenOffice.org both feature a new
 XML based file format, which stores document content, layout, and
 meta information as XML inside of a ZIP package, along with embedded
 graphics and objects. This organization as well as many details in
 the XML format itself provide many advantages to various groups of
 users, creating a win-win situation for all end users, developers and
 solution providers that make use of it.</P>
 <H1>5Online Resources and Further information</H1>
 <P ALIGN=LEFT>OpenOffice.org XML Homepage: <A HREF="http://xml.openoffice.org/">http://xml.openoffice.org/</A></P>
 <P ALIGN=LEFT>StarOffice/OpenOffice.org XML based file format
 definition: <A HREF="http://xml.openoffice.org/xml_specification.pdf">http://xml.openoffice.org/xml_specification.pdf</A></P>
 <P ALIGN=LEFT>The StarOffice/OpenOffice.org API:
 <A HREF="http://api.openoffice.org/">http://api.openoffice.org/</A></P>
 <P ALIGN=LEFT>&#147;Adventures with OpenOffice and XML&#148; by Matt
 Sergeant: <A HREF="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/02/07/openoffice.html">http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/02/07/openoffice.html</A></P>
 <P ALIGN=LEFT>OpenOffice.org Filter-Development Using XML:
 <A HREF="http://xml.openoffice.org/filter/">http://xml.openoffice.org/filter/</A></P>
 </body>
 </HTML>
	<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
	<HTML>
	<head>
	<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
	<TITLE>The StarOffice XML based file format</TITLE>
	<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="StarOffice 6.0 (Win32)">
	<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Daniel Vogelheim">
	<META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="20010803;16470900">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Daniel Vogelheim">
	<META NAME="CHANGED" CONTENT="20010821;15101200">
	<STYLE>
	<!--
	@page { margin: 2cm }
	P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; text-align: justify }
	H1 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; font-family: "Arial", sans-serif; font-size: 16pt }
	H2 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; font-family: "Arial", sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal }
	H3 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; font-family: "Arial", sans-serif; font-size: 12pt }
	-->
	</STYLE>
	</head>
	<body>
	<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-top: 0.42cm; page-break-after: avoid"><FONT FACE="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT SIZE=5>The
	StarOffice XML based file format</FONT></FONT></P>
	<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-top: 0.2cm; margin-bottom: 2cm; page-break-after: avoid">
	<FONT FACE="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT SIZE=3>To boldly go where no
	office suite has gone before</FONT></FONT></P>
	<H1>1Introduction</H1>
	<P>StarOffice 6.0 and OpenOffice.org use a new, XML based file format
	for all its documents. The constituent parts of an office document,
	content, layout and meta information, are stored as XML streams
	inside a ZIP file, along with embedded graphics and objects contained
	in the document.</P>
	<P>Before musing on the technical virtues and uses of the XML based
	file format, it should be noted that the format as well as the
	OpenOffice.org application, which serves as a reference
	implementation for the format, are available under a GNU license.
	This open and free licensing guarantees that you are not at the mercy
	of a single company for improvements and fixes of the format or its
	supporting software, thus providing very strong protection for all
	investments and efforts you put into this format. Additionally, Sun
	aims at standardizing the format, thus providing any interested
	parties with a way to participate in the evolution of the format.</P>
	<P>The next chapter will introduce several features of the XML
	format, followed by a chapter in which benefits can be derived from
	these features for various types of users. Finally, a conclusion will
	be presented.</P>
	<H1>2How It Works The Means</H1>
	<P>This chapter will highlight several technicalities of the XML
	based file format. The following chapter will then show how to put
	these into use.</P>
	<H2>2.1Separation of Content, Layout, and Meta Information</H2>
	<P STYLE="font-style: normal">An office document contains content,
	for example the text of a letter, or the data in a spreadsheet, along
	with layout information, which describes how the content should look
	like. Also part of document is meta information like who edited a
	document and how it is called, or additional information such as
	images or embedded objects. To a user, these are inseparable parts of
	a single document. But for processing the document, it makes sense to
	separate them such that they can be read, interpreted and modified
	independently of each other. To facilitate this, the StarOffice XML
	file format stores content, layout, meta information, images and
	embedded objects in separate streams of a ZIP based package file. The
	whole file contains the whole document, the individual streams
	contain the constituent parts of the document.</P>
	<H2>2.2Standards Based</H2>
	<P>When creating the XML based file format, we tried to gain as much
	as was possible from related standards. The very use of XML is one
	example. The ZIP format we use for packages are in widespread use.
	Many elements and attributes are borrowed from HTML, XSL-FO, XLink,
	Dublin Core, or SVG. For Math, we use MathML. This allows easy
	transformation from and into those formats, and also it allows people
	to quickly understand our format, if they are already familiar with
	those formats we make use of.</P>
	<H2>2.3Uniform Representation of Formatting and Layout Information</H2>
	<P>The StarOffice and OpenOffice.org applications distinguish between
	formatting through styles and <I>direct</I> formatting, which means
	applying formatting directly to text or cell ranges. In the XML
	format, these different ways to format a document use the same
	style-based representation. The <I>direct</I> formatting is
	automatically converted into <I>automatic styles</I>, which is a
	style-based formatting equivalent of the <I>direct</I> formatting the
	user applied to the document.</P>
	<H2>2.4Structured Format</H2>
	<P STYLE="font-style: normal">A primary design goal of the XML format
	was to represent all structured information contained in an document
	as XML structures, thus making the document fully accessible to
	standard XML tools. This is a quite different solution to, for
	example, an XHTML/CSS solution, where all CSS formatting information
	is encoded in a text-only format. This way, all layout information
	appears as a single string to an XSLT processor, making it very hard
	to process the layout information in any way.</P>
	<H2>2.5Idealized Format</H2>
	<P><SPAN STYLE="font-style: normal">Our XML file format is a properly
	designed file format, as opposed </SPAN>to a mere XML dump o<SPAN STYLE="font-style: normal">f
	core structures with all their implementation details and
	limitations. The documents are represented in a way which is easy to
	understand and use, and not in a way which is easy to implement. This
	allows the format to abstract application peculiarities and therefore
	the format may also be used by applications other than StarOffice and
	OpenOffice.org. Throughout the development of the format, great care
	was taken to make sure the file format is easy to process. Also, the
	idealized representation makes it easier to improve the StarOffice
	and OpenOffice.org applications without having to make major changes
	to the format itself.</SPAN></P>
	<H2>2.6Common Format Across All Office Applications</H2>
	<P STYLE="font-style: normal">The same format is used across all
	office applications. Similar concepts in the different applications
	always use the same XML representation. For example, spreadsheet
	tables and word processor tables share a common XML representation,
	even though their implementations and limitations are quite
	different. This has great advantages when processing or generating
	StarOffice files: The same code works for all applications. For
	example, a single XSLT style sheet can process both spreadsheets and
	text documents.</P>
	<H2>2.7Open For Extensions and Supplemental Information</H2>
	<P STYLE="font-style: normal">Arbitrary XML attributes may be
	attached to style information and will be preserved when editing such
	a modified file with StarOffice. Because all formatting information
	is uniformly represented as styles, and because any document content
	can be formatted using styles, this allows arbitrary information to
	be attached to any part of the document content. Further means to add
	supplemental information, such as allowing complete streams to be
	part of the packages, may be added.</P>
	<H1>3What You Gain The Ends</H1>
	<P>The previous chapter has highlighted several features and
	mechanisms of our new file format. This chapter will look at how this
	helps different groups of users.</P>
	<H2>3.1Office Users</H2>
	<P>To the user of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, the main benefits
	may be summarized as increased robustness, openness, document
	longevity, and version interoperability. In additional, the user will
	gain additional benefits as the document processing and additional
	solutions described in the following chapters become reality.</P>
	<H3>Increased Robustness</H3>
	<P>To a user, their own documents are usually valuable resources,
	into which lots of time and effort has been invested. What happens,
	if through an error in the used hardware or software used, the
	documents become corrupted? With a binary format, the user is at the
	mercy of the original application: If it can still read or recover
	the document, all is well. If not, the document is lost.
	</P>
	<P STYLE="font-style: normal">XML makes it easy to ignore and
	tolerate problems in the documents, so the likelihood of lost
	documents is reduced. Additionally, the human readable/editable
	nature of XML allows advanced users or service personnel to inspect
	corrupt files and restore the documents, even without specialized
	tools or very much in-depth knowledge.</P>
	<H3>Document Archiving</H3>
	<P>For some users, long-term storage of documents is important. With
	binary file formats, documents can be read only as long as the
	supporting application as well as the system it runs on exists. XML,
	being a text based and human readable format, allows files to be read
	even if the original application (or the OS, or the hardware it ran
	on) are not available anymore. Additionally, the thorough
	documentation of the format allows the files to be fully interpreted.</P>
	<H3>Version Interoperability</H3>
	<P>A well-known problem with office documents is a file format
	versioning problem: New versions of the office suite usually come
	with a new version of a file format, which the older version don't
	know about. To be able read the newer documents, users find
	themselves forced to upgrade their application.</P>
	<P>Contrast this with an XML based format: XML is extensible, making
	it easy to to add new features to the format without loosing the
	ability to read older files. Older applications will simply ignore
	the new (and, to them, unknown) content, thus reading the newer files
	as well as they can. The result is a high degree of forwards and
	backwards compatibility.
	</P>
	<H3>Documented and Transparent File Content</H3>
	<P>With the XML file format, the user can finally inspect the content
	of files that are being sent or received. If yet another macro virus
	threatens your organization, a simple combination of unzip and grep
	allows you to check for suspicious content. If you want to make sure
	that files you send to other people don't contain sensitive
	information, then now you can simply look at them. Or if you need to
	quickly find a certain document, just use Unix grep or the Windows
	Explorer context menu to search through the meta information, which
	are stored as plain text.</P>
	<H2>3.2Document Processing and Developers</H2>
	<P>Advanced users and developers may want to make use of the new
	freedom the StarOffice XML file brings them, and use and process
	StarOffice files with other tools and applications. There are several
	advantages for them:</P>
	<H3>Standards Based and Openness</H3>
	<P>The StarOffice XML file format relies on many standards in
	addition to the actual XML standard itself: It makes use of elements
	and attributes from HTML, XLink, XSL-FO, Dublin Core, and SVG.
	Developers familiar with these can easily pick up on the StarOffice
	format. Also, a developer has a wide choice of tools and code
	libraries for many programming languages that allow processing and
	manipulation of XML or ZIP files.</P>
	<P>This use of established standards is particularly useful for
	making office documents available outside of traditional PC
	applications. For example, by transforming our office documents into
	HTML, you can make them available through the World Wide Web. Similar
	transformations are into WAP or XSL-FO are possible.
	</P>
	<P>An example of transforming our documents into HTML is available on
	the OpenOffice.org website, and another one is available through the
	xml.com website (see reference at the end of this paper).
	</P>
	<H3>Easy Import and Export of Other File Formats</H3>
	<P>Import and export of other '<I>foreign</I>' file formats can be
	accomplished by converting the document into the XML file format.
	This approach has several advantages:</P>
	<OL>
	<LI><P>The XML file format provides the developer with a clean,
	documented target.</P>
	<LI><P>Due to XML's human readability, debugging becomes much
	easier.</P>
	<LI><P>The file format and the StarOffice API hide the details of a
	particular office version, so the developer doesn't have to
	recompile and update the import/export component for every new
	version of StarOffice.</P>
	<LI><P>Several XML based import or export components may be chained
	to each other. This can be used to convert between two
	non-StarOffice formats.</P>
	<LI><P>Import and Export components can be integrated into
	StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, or they can be used stand-alone. In
	the latter mode, they could be used e.g. for batch conversion of
	many files. Also, they can be used to view StarOffice XML documents
	without having to start the full StarOffice application.</P>
	</OL>
	<H3>Leverage Available Infrastructures</H3>
	<P>Being based on XML and ZIP, the StarOffice file format can be used
	with the growing number of widely available tools that can process
	these formats. Examples are:</P>
	<OL>
	<LI><P>XML viewers and editors</P>
	<P>Any of the available XML viewers can be used to examine the
	document content. XML Editors can be used to manually make changes
	to the document content or its layout.</P>
	<LI><P>XML transformations</P>
	<P>XML transformation tools and libraries, such as XSLT engines or
	XPathScript (Perl), can be used to automatically edit, modify or
	generate StarOffice documents.</P>
	<LI><P>XML Databases</P>
	<P>There is a growing number of XML aware database and storage
	products. These may be used to store, index, query and manipulate
	StarOffice documents.</P>
	<LI><P>ZIP tools</P>
	<P>With the package mechanism using the well-known ZIP format,
	standard ZIP tools may be used to change the package content. For
	example, using any ZIP tool, embedded graphics can be changed from
	low resolution to high resolution ones before giving a document to a
	print shop.</P>
	</OL>
	<H2>3.3Solution Providers</H2>
	<P>A generic office suite may not be the right solution for everyone.
	Often, significant improvements to productivity can be achieved by
	using custom software solutions tailored exactly to the requirements
	of a particular organization. StarOffice and OpenOffice.org can
	become part of such a solution, supplying office functionality as
	part of an larger, fully integrated package. Solution providers who
	want to integrate StarOffice or OpenOffice.org into their software
	will find the XML file format along with the open StarOffice API to
	be the enabling features for this.</P>
	<H3>StarOffice as Editor Component</H3>
	<P>The StarOffice API enables the use of StarOffice as an editor
	component. In this mode of operation, StarOffice may appear as an
	edit area within the custom application, controlled through the API.
	The custom application only needs to represent its own data in the
	StarOffice XML file format and hand it to the StarOffice component.
	When the editing is done, the custom application can then convert the
	XML data stream back into its own, native format for storage or
	further processing.</P>
	<H3>Search Engines / Knowledge Management Systems</H3>
	<P STYLE="font-style: normal">The use of XML makes office documents
	accessible to search engines and more advanced knowledge management
	systems. Since the full document structure is available as XML,
	knowledge management system could easily extract or value document
	content based on how or where it is contained in the document.</P>
	<P STYLE="font-style: normal">Search engines can usually been
	configured for different file types. To index and search StarOffice
	XML files, all that is necessary is to teach the search engine to run
	the venerable 'unzip' command on each file before processing it.</P>
	<H3>Document Management</H3>
	<P STYLE="font-style: normal">StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are
	ideally suited for integration into document management systems.
	Here, a key feature is the ability to attach additional data to
	documents or parts of documents. A document management system can use
	this to include additional information into the documents while still
	keeping the documents fully editable by the user. As detailed above,
	StarOffice and OpenOffice.org may additionally be used as editing
	components inside the document management system.</P>
	<H3>Partial Editing and Two-way Conversion</H3>
	<P>Custom applications may want to modify or update office documents
	based on specific data or computations. XML makes it easy to identify
	specific parts of a document and to replace them. The separation of
	content and layout further helps this because it allows changing one
	without having to change the other.</P>
	<P>A similar approach is to extract data from a StarOffice document
	and process it in some way. Then, merge the new data into the
	document again, or just recreate the document based on the new data.
	Such back-and-forth conversions are simplified by XML's nature, and
	the content/layout separation.</P>
	<P>This technique could be used to support StarOffice documents (or
	parts of documents) on resource constrained devices, such as PDAs.
	</P>
	<H3>StarOffice as Layout Engine</H3>
	<P><SPAN STYLE="font-style: normal">At the end of the data processing
	chain, a </SPAN>custom application may need to present data to users
	or generate printable documents, summaries and reports. When using
	StarOffice, this can be achieved by converting the presentation data
	into the StarOffice XML file format, and loading it into StarOffice
	for layout and printing. This way, the full power of StarOffice can
	be leveraged for professionally looking documents without having to
	recreate the entire formatting and layout logic. Once again, the
	separation of content and layout helps, as it allows painless
	generation of the plain content data, which can then be combined with
	professional, artistic layout information.</P>
	<H1>4Conclusion</H1>
	<P>The upcoming StarOffice 6.0 and OpenOffice.org both feature a new
	XML based file format, which stores document content, layout, and
	meta information as XML inside of a ZIP package, along with embedded
	graphics and objects. This organization as well as many details in
	the XML format itself provide many advantages to various groups of
	users, creating a win-win situation for all end users, developers and
	solution providers that make use of it.</P>
	<H1>5Online Resources and Further information</H1>
	<P ALIGN=LEFT>OpenOffice.org XML Homepage: <A HREF="http://xml.openoffice.org/">http://xml.openoffice.org/</A></P>
	<P ALIGN=LEFT>StarOffice/OpenOffice.org XML based file format
	definition: <A HREF="http://xml.openoffice.org/xml_specification.pdf">http://xml.openoffice.org/xml_specification.pdf</A></P>
	<P ALIGN=LEFT>The StarOffice/OpenOffice.org API:
	<A HREF="http://api.openoffice.org/">http://api.openoffice.org/</A></P>
	<P ALIGN=LEFT>Adventures with OpenOffice and XML by Matt
	Sergeant: <A HREF="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/02/07/openoffice.html">http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/02/07/openoffice.html</A></P>
	<P ALIGN=LEFT>OpenOffice.org Filter-Development Using XML:
	<A HREF="http://xml.openoffice.org/filter/">http://xml.openoffice.org/filter/</A></P>
	</body>
	</HTML>