I sent an email to Brian Jones, Program Manager for MS Word, asking some questions
about the new MS Word XML capabilities. Get this… he answered me. Now
that is just cool. Maybe Microsoft is staffed with real people.
I am respecting the exchange enough not to just post the email thread, but suffice
to say that as of this time, MS Word is not targeting the XML editor market to take
on the likes of XMetal and XML Spy. Basically MS is simply concentrating on
standardizing the MS Office formats on their own schema. They are going to be
looking at support for other people’s schema but they aren’t going to be harping those
features for awhile yet.
I guess XMetal will stay in my life for awhile longer. Maybe Office 2008.