Balisage Paper: Office Suite Markup: Is it worthwhile?
Patrick Durusau
Patrick Durusau has been trained as a lawyer, network administrator, and biblical scholar, all of which probably contributed to his current involvement in standards work. (Whether that is reward or punishment is not certain.) Patrick is the Editor of OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 at OASIS, chairs the ODF Metadata subcommittee of the ODF TC at OASIS, is chair of INCITS V1, convener of the Topic Maps Working Group in ISO and a co-editor of several parts of the topic maps standard. Patrick also teaches a course on topic maps at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Patrick, Carol (his wife), and Clarence (their Boston Terrier) are embarking on a chicken farming venture (very small, 12 chickens) with Barred Hollands. Their coloration was a major factor in choosing that particular breed.
Copyright © 2008 by the author. Used with permission.
Abstract
There is a lot of smoke but is there any fire? Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Oracle, Google, Redhat and others are contending over two XML vocabularies for office documents (word processor, spread sheet, presentation tool, etc.) at the moment. Fans of OOXML or ODF are hard to find among people who have spent the last twenty years researching and developing markup and markup systems. In fact, many in the markup community dismiss these efforts as unimportant and/or uninteresting. Patrick Durusau, the editor of ODF and who has called for the co-evolution of OOXML and ODF in an ISO context thinks they are important, possibly very important. Come find out what has captured the interest of at least one topic map and overlapping markup theorist.