Subject: FW: [Moderator Action] Re: More on "Webify Word? No Way!"

From: "Jim Whitehead" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 11:40:50 -0700

Accidentally caught by the spam filter (though Matthew quoted this message
in his response, so you may have already seen it...)

- Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, October 02, 2000 2:14 AM
To: [WEB-IDEAS] LISTMASTER
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: [Moderator Action] Re: More on "Webify Word? No Way!"

Matthew,

I read and re-read your post, but couldn't quite figure out what position
you were taking on Word.

The IETF require the document submissions to be simple ASCII texts, however
you can appreciate that editing a living document in this fashion is
significantly more work than using the facilities of a word processor.  The
advantage is that it produces various forms of output -- I prefer to review
the Word version as I find it more readable, and Word can produce the ASCII
format required by IETF.

As Geoff points out, Word also supports WebFolders for collaborative
authoring, and it faithfully follows WebDAV RFC2518 in this respect.  Don't
confuse the fact that Word uses XML in its source with its use of WebDAV
protocol.

Regards,
Tim

"[WEB-IDEAS] LISTMASTER" <[email-masked]> on
2000-09-29 05:45:51 PM

Please respond to "[WEB-IDEAS] LISTMASTER" <[email-masked]>

To:   "WEB - IDEAS" <[email-masked]>
cc:   "'WebDAV WG'" <[email-masked]> (bcc: Tim Ellison/UK/IBM)
Subject:  More on "Webify Word? No Way!"

More on WebDAV:

 http://www.webdav.org/deltav/protocol/draft-ietf-deltav-versioning-08.htm
(co-authored by Christopher Kaller of Microsoft)

Look at the source code:
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 9">
<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 9">

For those of us who question why this Internet Draft html would be
published Microsoft Word:

WebDAV conventiently stores all resource properties in an XML document.
WebDAV (and now DeltaV) is being developed to use MSIE5+ as
a front end in conjunction with the Windows 2000 platform Web Folders
feature acting as a remote client.

JimWhitehead, Chair of the webDAV Working Group and Assistant Professor of
Software Engineering at UCSC
(http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/papers/whitehead_diss.pdf)e xplains that the
goal of the new DeltaV protocol is to take out "a lock on
the resource, write its
contents, write the property, then unlock". He goes on to say that if you
"wanted to add this property capability for a third-party
client, like Word, then you're
currently out of luck".

So why author the Web version of the the document linked above in Word?

Again we ought to refer to the source code:
<o:DocumentProperties>
  <o:Author>Geoffrey Clemm, Jim Amsden, Christopher Kaler, Jim
Whitehead</o:Author>
  <o:LastAuthor>Geoffrey Clemm</o:LastAuthor>
  <o:Revision>2</o:Revision>
  <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
  <o:LastPrinted>2000-07-07T16:26:00Z</o:LastPrinted>
  <o:Created>2000-09-11T16:53:00Z</o:Created>
  <o:LastSaved>2000-09-11T16:53:00Z</o:LastSaved>
  <o:Pages>61</o:Pages>
  <o:Words>19456</o:Words>
  <o:Characters>110903</o:Characters>
  <o:Company>World Wide Web Consortium</o:Company>
  <o:Lines>924</o:Lines>
  <o:Paragraphs>221</o:Paragraphs>
  <o:CharactersWithSpaces>136196</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
  <o:Version>9.3821</o:Version>
 </o:DocumentProperties>
</xml>

MS Word 2000 embeds version data into the head of the document using the
MSO markup flavor of XML.
Word autolocks a document that is under development so that one user, or
group member is editing it at a time.
When the editor is finished writing, saves the document and closes it, the
version data is embedded.
When the document is closed, it is unlocked and another user or group
member can continue its development.

Word is an effective authoring and version control application for Internet
publishing.
Web pages authored in Word are kind of crufty.
This author hopes that WebDav will eliminate the need to rely on Word to
control authoring and versioning for Web document
publishing.

S. Matthew Hersey, MA Ed.
Technical Writer, Operations
Certainty Solutions, Inc.

"Certainty in an Uncertain World"