Word 2007 XML “cleaning process” already underway
Microsoft has already begun the process of altering Word to comply with a court order. Were it not to do so, it would have been barred from selling Office 2007 from Jan. 11.
As Dave Parrack reported earlier today, a federal appeals court upheld a previous ruling that Microsoft had breached patents belonging to i4i which cover the way XML documents are read in Word. The firm responded to the ruling by noting that retail copies of both the Office 2007 suite and Word 2007 itself will be reissued with the relevant features disabled.
Microsoft has since issued a mandatory patch for OEMs (firms which make computers) to apply to copies of Office which they’ve already installed on machines they’ve produced. Whether there is enough time for firms to make the changes is questionable. Dell and HP had both asked the court to allow 120 days between the deadline being confirmed and coming into effect.
The update appears to have been produced in October when the original ban on Word sales would have taken place if Microsoft had not appealed over the verdict. That may be a sign that the appeal was as much about buying time to make sure Microsoft could meet the deadline smoothly as it was a genuine expectation that the ruling would be overturned.
XML, which stands for Extensible Markup Language, is designed primarily for online documents and is a follow-up to the better known HTML. Whereas HTML coding is purely about the layout and appearance of text, XML allows coding which defines text into categories: in effect, what the text is about rather than how it appears. For example, recipe text could be marked up as either “ingredients” or “instructions”, making it easier to organize recipes into online databases.
The good news for users is that even with the changes, Word will still be able to open XML documents. However, any custom-designed XML coding will be removed during the process of opening the document.
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