How microformats relate to custom XML

I've blogged a few times about the support for custom defined schema in the OpenXML formats. (https://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/tags/Custom+Schema+Solutions/default.aspx)

I've had a few folks ask me if there are similarities between the custom defined schema support and Microformats. While the approach is a bit different, the scenarios are very similar. The key is that you want to take documents stored in a presentation based format (HTML, OpenXML, ODF), and add additional information that helps describe the actual meaning of the data. This makes it much easier to search for, reuse, and modify the data within a document. Doug Mahugh has a great post that talks about how you could take some of the microformat schemas out there and apply them to an office document using the custom XML support. Take a look: https://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/03/03/microformats-and-open-xml.aspx

The added benefit of the custom xml support tied to content controls is that you can program against just the data and not interact with the display markup at all if you choose. I had a couple screencasts where I demo'd how this works:

• Operating against your data rather than Word's data – In this screencast I give a quick demo of the benefit you have as a developer / solution builder when you map your data to the content controls within a document.
• Moving custom XML data from Excel to Word – In this screencast I show how you can use the custom XML support in Word and Excel to move your own data between the two applications. Rather than the basic copy/paste type functionality where you move the content and presentation, in this example I use Excel to run a model against my data and pull together some results. I then take the results out of the table in Excel and present them in a completely different format in Word.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 05, 2007
  [off topic] hi Brian. do you have any comments about the recent public NB comments and ECMA responses ( http://www.computerworld.com/pdfs/Ecma.pdf )? What happens next ? Thanks in advance

• Anonymous
  March 05, 2007
  Hey Carl, I think that was a leak, and I actually wanted to wait until ISO or Ecma publicly release the documents before commenting too much. I'm obviously on Ecma TC45 and so I wouldn't feel comfortable commenting until Ecma has made an official statement. If the computerworld document matches what Ecma sent in to ISO it should do a pretty good job of describing the various comments raised and helping to clarify why they are not contradictions. Next up is for ISO to review the document and decide what the next steps should be. -Brian