Integrating Domino with Office 2000 via XML (Page 2)

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Integrating Domino with Office 2000 via XML (continued)

The Office armory
Office 2000 uses a fistful of different techniques to work-around the old limitations. Like the Domino-generated spreadsheets demonstrated in the previous article, Office now embeds Office-specific tags and attributes (e.g., formulae, crosstab selections) that will be ignored by current Web browsers, but can be picked up again when the Web page is re-imported to Office. These embedded custom tags are the contribution of XML. They might look much the same as the custom tags available in Excel 97 HTML, but now they can be externally validated by XML schemas and Document Type Definitions (DTDs), and hence have a sort of semi-official Web status.

Let's define a couple of terms we're going to be using. A tag is a piece of HTML or XML markup, such as <P>, <TABLE> or <HTML>. It's always enclosed in angle brackets. An attribute is a parameter placed inside the angle brackets of a tag (e.g., the SRC of <IMG SRC="../icons/act001.gif">).

To transfer the layout of document, the more well established Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used (versions 1 and 2 for maximum browser compatibility). For mimicking the worksheet tabs of Excel workbooks, JavaScript functions are built into the generated XHTML (Extended HTML). The Microsoft specified XML-based Vector Markup Language (VML) is used for complex line graphics such as OfficeArt, and other files such as GIF images or macros are saved as external files into an accompanying folder -- just as Internet Explorer 5 will do when you save any Web page. IntelliMirror in Windows 2000 is designed to automatically shift around these supporting folders to follow the main Web pages.

Additionally, if you wish the Office Web pages to be interactive, they can be saved to reference ActiveX components for spreadsheets, charts, crosstabs, and database. These Office Web Components (OWC) permit any user with both Internet Explorer 4 or greater and Office 2000 to play around with the data on the Web page. It won't work with a Web browser that doesn't support COM (Component Object Model) objects, such as Netscape; in fact anything less than IE5 won't work perfectly. The other restriction's both technical and legal -- the CAB (Microsoft Cabinet) files containing the objects can be set up to be downloaded to a user without Office 2000, but this requires that each such user hold a license for Office 2000, even if not actually installed. This option, therefore, is only useful if your pages will be accessed solely over an intranet by users who can be relied on to have the latest Microsoft software installed.

The Domino angle
What is of most interest to Domino developers here is two-fold. First, this provides an ability to access all of the content and formatting of Office documents without recourse to interpreting binary files or OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) object model coding. This also means that non-Wintel servers can join in the fun of taking apart Office files.

Although primarily in place to allow Office generated documents to "round-trip" via the Web back into Office, there's no reason why Office Web documents can't be generated entirely out of Office. A Domino server could create complex mail-merge files, crosstabs, or charts with rich functionality and send them onto Office users, again without the need for OLE, installing Office on servers, or messing with binary files.