Don't invent your own word processing template

Tim Bray has a go at convincing people not to go inventing more XML languages. He has a point or two.

I want to add one point: don't go inventing your own styles or templates in OpenOffice.org or Word either.

Two of five use cases presented by Tim Bray particularly interest me. XHTML and ODF (Open Document Format).

XHTML + Microformats · If you’re delivering information to humans over the Web, even if you don’t think of it as “Web Pages”, it’s almost certainly insane not to use XHTML. Yes, XHTML is semantically weak and doesn’t really grok hierarchy and has a bunch of other problems. That’s OK, because it has a general-purpose class attribute and ignores markup it doesn’t know about and you can bastardize it eight ways from center without anything breaking. The Kool Kids call this “Microformats” and in fact I accidentally invented one on ongoing last November; look at that template and its class attributes.¶

And of course, if you use XHTML you can feed it to the browsers that are already there on a few hundred million desktops and humans can read it, and if they want to know how to do what it’s doing, they can “View Source”—these are powerful arguments.

ODF · Suppose you’re working with material that’s going to have a lot of workflow around it, and be complex, visually if not structurally, and maybe some day will be printed out and have signatures at the bottom. ODF is what you want. Not the most Web-oriented approach, but on the other hand the authoring tools are more human-friendly than anything else on this list.¶

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/08/No-New-XML-Languages

So what if you want to work with both? You want to work on complex material, using human-friendly tools and ODF and you want to deliver it to humans over the web using XHTML?

There's a missing link between ODF and XHTML which is the point of the work we've been doing at USQ on the ICE project to build general purpose templates. We hope to be able to better than what Tim Bray calls “Not the most Web-oriented approach”.

Why not use microformats in ODF as well? And why not standardize on a set of class attributes? (They're called styles in the word processing world)

The next release of ICE, due later this month will ship with (mostly) interoperable Word and OpenOffice templates, so you can collaborate across platforms and applications, with a pre-built but extensible set of styles. It will make both PDF and XTHML for your stuff and link it all together into stand-alone packages suitable for uploading into a learning management system. That is, you can distribute on the web in XHTML with PDFs for individual pages and for an entire book, and still have the more human-friendly tools with which to author. Not only that, ICE uses Subversion to look after and version-control your content. I'll announce the new version here.

Along with generic middle of the road document formatting ICE has experimental-stage microformats for quizzing, so you can author a quiz using tables in the word processor and have it come out as a bit of live interactive HTML, as well as (eventually) the IMS QTI quiz interchange standard.

I will add to Tim Bray's call to not invent your own XML language. I say don't invent your own Word / OpenDocument template either. Start with one that's XHTML compatible already, and help us work out some conventions for extending the base template, by joining the as-yet-dormant mailing list. You can avoid all the pain I described in this article about the woeful state of XHTML export from OpenOffice.org.

While ODF is a standard format, it's a very very generic one with a very complex customization layer. To use it well in a complex workflow you need templates, but designing good templates is just as hard as designing an XML language. If you want to produce a set of consistent documents efficiently you have to design something that deals with the underlying document model in a simple sensible way. And while it would be nice to assume that using ODF makes documents portable I doubt this is the case in the short term, as new implementations will have subtle differences in the way they handle various features and you have to think about Word interop as well.

The lists in ODF for example, at least as implemented in OpenOffice.org version 2, are a nightmare (and the list model is only partly implemented by the way), but we have done all the hard work of figuring out how to work with lists and how to do so in a way that will interoperate with Microsoft Word.

ICE does have Windows and Mac OS X 10.4 downloads available. Get the latest version of the application and templates here, but it's only a version 0.2 at the moment. Try it if you're curious and email me if you need assistance. A few people have downloaded it and contacted me, how are the rest of you going with ICE?