WordML Schemas Offered
The Danish ISB has uploaded the schemas for Microsoft Word offered under a liberal license. Various people within MSFT, Danish government, and others worked very hard to make this happen, and it’s a very significant announcement.
The biggest news happened when Word began to support XML natively, though,and most people already had the right to create WordML documents dynamically from their own code anyway (because who doesn’t own a copy of Word?). But this is a nice step, especially for public sectors around the world.
For people who are not accustomed to looking at schemas, the new schema may appear to be no simpler than the RTF specs published for prior versions. But I would urge anyone who thinks so to “just try it”. I was able in a matter of minutes to write code to dynamically generate Word documents. You can do it in three easy steps: 1)create a template Word document, save as XML, 2) crack the file in notepad and 3) use the sample to drive your own code. I have been threatening to write an article for MSDN demonstrating this concept, but it seems insultingly remedial. Since XSLT templates are simply XML, you can even cut-paste a word doc into notepad, wrap with a few