Wow, what a wonderful piece of information to know! I'll look at adding this as something on Zope.org from a Member's preferences page.
That's something that I'm just now starting to pick up to speed on. Creating a Zope Tip for something like this isn't a bad idea.
Another MS specific thing I've been doing a lot lately is Office2k's new HTML file format, kind of an MSXHTML thingie. We needed a way to paginate and desktop publish the various structured text documents we author as part of the Unified Process we use here for consulting gigs.
We're looking for much the same thing here (as are most businesses :) I'm working on an Engineering Intranet site for Engineering Documents with complete version control and histories. The most difficult part is working with structured text/graphics documents in a way that can be updated back on the Zope server. Both Python and Zope take a bit of getting used to, even for a seasoned vet :) The PDF hacks looked interesting - but this won't be adequate. Users want Microsoft Office, they want to store documents in a common repository (with some sort of index and search), and it wouldn't hurt if everything were on the Intranet.
Since (a) the new format is a clear-text compatible language, and (b) Zope is WebDAV compatible, we can get Zope to cobble together numerous documents into one long Word Document. Even better, what you're actually viewing in Word is generated from different DTML methods, meaning we can give different contents based on things like queries, the role of the user, etc.
EXACTLY what I'm looking for. Collaboration on this is a must :)
I'm modelling our sales funnel in Excel based on data pumped from an XML Document through various DTML methods that give me different detail. It's really cool!
*pant, drool* There must be others out there with this same need. A full document publishing system based on XML with WebDAV publishing and web presentation - it's paperless office nirvana. People are developing Access databases and Excell spreadsheets everywhere today for this very reason. Replace it with a simple to maintain web interface and they're sold. Sales will want it. Engineering will want it. Marketing will want it. Finance will want it. And IS shops *should* be willing to supply it. :)
Yes, I spent literally 4 hours scouring their (Microsofts) website and the web at large for some kind of documentation of this damn MSXHTML-like markup language they use. I want to modify the Excel spreadsheet and, using WebDAV, save it back to Zope, which would parse it and update things.
Been there. Done that. Burned the T-Shirt. If there were only a true OpenSource rich-text XML editing platform with the same featureset. Someday (soon I hope), we will have options.
I'm a damn, damn good web scourer, and eventually concluded that Microsoft intentionally doesn't document it. Believe it or not, their DTD declaration points to an ActiveX control. Thus, their DTD is a non-published, compiled, binary, internal thing. Unreal.
It's an XML schema. Everyone has their own schema these days. Most of them not fully formed DTD, or published :) - Ian C. Blenke <ian@blenke.com> <icblenke@2c2.com>