Interview: Doug Mahugh - Open XML Extensibility - OpenXML Developer - Blog

Interview by Chris Auld: March 9, 2010

Doug Mahugh is the Lead Standards Professional on the Office Interoperability team at Microsoft. http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/

In this interview, Chris Auld from Microsoft Partner Intergen and Locum Jobs Agency Medrecruit talks to Doug about topics such as the Open XML SDK 2.0, international standards, and Mark-up Compatability and Extensibility.

To listen to the audio click here.

Chris:
This is Chris Auld from Open XML developer, I’m here with Doug Mahugh it is a somewhat cold but otherwise not to unpleasant Redmond afternoon, late in the afternoon, and we thought we’d have a bit of a chat today about Open XML in particular some of the extensibility capabilities in Open XML.

Doug:
Sounds good Chris, good to have you here, we saved all of our weather for you today, there is a little snow today, a little rain, a little sleet a little sun.

Chris:
Four seasons in one day Doug, that’s what they say quite often about New Zealand.

Chris:
So I thought today we’d have a chat about really the future of Open XML. What is the process for extending Open XML through mark-up compatibility and extensibility constructs and what is the process for actually changing Open XML through the ISO process.

Doug:
Yeah, that’s an interesting topic at this point in time, because I’ll tell you where we are at with maintenance and when I say we right now I’m talking about SC34 not Microsoft I’m one of many participants there, where we are at is we did the first round of changes first set of core agenda in standard speak and a first set of amendments, those have all been ramped up, voted on, it’s kind of a complicated process we don’t need to get there’s one more vote that’s about to start in 60 day ballot so now we are looking forward at additional changes to the standard, there are some things cued up that various countries have submitted and everybody has ideas to start submitting and just recently along the lines were talking about with MC there have been a couple of proposals from Japan that happen to use MC and one of them, a proposal to document the particular extensions that Office 2010 has in it that we’ve already documented on a Microsoft website but they want to take that a little bit further and describe how to use something like MVDL to validate those documents because these documents they have little raisins in the raisin cake if you will, little pieces of our mark-up that are our particular extensions that are packaged with MCE within the Open XML document.

So Japan would like to see that documented and how does one validate that, one being a developer who is trying to consume that document and then separately the other proposal there that has caused me to read alot of Wikipedia entries I had never seen before, is one about Japanese layout requirements and I think I’m pronouncing correctly kihonhanmen is the name of this particular way of laying out a page, here’s how you look at it, you and I are used to the latin characters that we write in from left to right, once down the page whereas they’re used to the view where you have these square regions on the page, picture a piece of graph paper and where everything lays out nice and tidy and you can read across from left to right but also you can go up and down and the characters are perfectly aligned.

Now imagine if you are wrapping around an image or something, how to do you still keep it perfectly aligned so that images and integer number of squares that it knocks out in the layout so that’s the basic concept, We have some meetings coming up on Stockholm later this month where SC34 will start looking through this but the cool thing about that Japanese proposal for kihonhanmen separate from the subject matter itself, the cool thing from my point of view is it’s the first proposal that actually uses MCE that is being suggested for an additioner change to the standard because that has been our vision all along is that the standard MC would be the primary mechanism for adding new functionality to the standard going forward.

Chris:
So basically the life cycle will be something along the lines of parties could innovate using MCE with the anticipation that should that innovation prove successful, popular, useful to sort of the broader community that could then be sort of pulled through into the full standards process.

Doug:
Exactly so it’s kind of happened twice here um MS has done some extensions in Office 2010 um things like spark lines or new transitions in PowerPoint.

Chris:
Vortex transition right.

Doug:
Yeah yeah it’s super cool, those new ones so things are done in a way that takes advantage of MSCE and some of those may end up in the standard over time or not our position has been very clear from the beginning we’re supportive of adding them to standard and at the same time we’re not going to be presumptuous and assume that the global community wants every one of our particular extensions added so there will be surely another lively debate in WG4 about which one should be included and then like let’s say if you were come up with something you know the guys over at Intergen come up with some cool idea and they package it up as a little alternate content blog and if that takes off, if its popular broadly that could be submitted as yet another MCE addition so this Japan proposal is the first test of that whole process.

Chris:
That was always the concern for me when we went through that standardisation process was its fantastic because it gives you a common format to share among organisations but at the same time it introduces a whole new bunch of challenges around to be frank Doug, the standards process doesn’t generally move at IT Sector speeds.

Doug:
That’s the understatement of the day, yes that’s quite true. And of course there’s reasons for it, I mean there’s some valid reasons to move very slowly and careful with international standards but implementer, software developers are used to going at warp speed and you hear a customer wants something so you want to be the first one to have running code by next week that does something about it that does this modern agile kind of mindset really clashes with the slow careful double check everything approach of international standards and one way to look at MCE is it helps provide a kind of loose linkage between these rapid spurts of innovation and this slow plodding standard process relentlessly moving forward so that the innovation can kind of scurry ahead for a while and then the standards process may catch-up and incorporate some of that or ignore some of it that doesn’t seem worthy of being in the standard and they are kind of loosely coupled in that way.

Chris:
Absolutely because I think there are times when you are going to be using MCE constructs for things that arguably should be in the standard right and you can see there is a good reason for them to be in the standard and at the same time it’s likely we will see a number of organisations using MCE constructs for things that would never be in the standard for things where they want to apply some of their own completely arbitrary mark-up that is specific to just their client implementation.

Doug:
Yeah you might have um software that does some specialised thing that renders a specialised type of graphical object or something that means something in your particular environment or your organisation but is not broadly supported by others, MC lets you plug those into the document and yet they remain conformant office Open XML documents

Chris:
So that’s the key to me so it means that there are mechanisms by which you can place your own markup in the documents and know the way it’s going to be treated by other consumers of that document and know that aren’t going to break other consumers of that document.

Doug:
Yeah and one of the problems its solves is absent a mechanism like MCE you have this um kind of tension that builds where implentors of a standard they to innovate they want to add more features how do they do that, do they go to the standard body that includes all of their competitors and everyone in the industry and publically say “we’re working on a really cool feature we’d like to ship in a year or so what do you all think” well you can never then roll out something bold and new if you go with that approach yet at the same time if you just quietly add to the schemas or extend things in your own propriertary way now you’re breaking conformance with the standard

Chris:
...and two, you’re breaking some of that relationship and some of that buy in into the standard.

Doug:
Absolutely.

Chris:
That has always been a thing for people, that uncontrolled innovation embrace and extend.

Doug:
Yeah.

Chris:
You want to make sure that you know, if you‘re going to do that it’s done in a managed type fashion.

Doug:
And truthfully where we are at right now with MCE, we are discussing with in the standards bodies um whether people agree with this vision of how that can work for extensibility and we feel it’s a pretty good model that has served us well for what we have done in Office 2010 but is there going to be broad uptake of that or is everyone in agreement that that is the right way to go? We hope so there are some hopeful signs that that is the case , the discussion is ongoing, nothing has been decided yet as we sit here today the only aspect of MCE that is in the standard is the definition of how MC works but not any instances of using it MC yet to extend it.

Chris:
That’s fantastic, I’ve enjoyed having a catch-up today thanks Doug um and so for people who have read this ah, it’s part of our launch wave content around the release of the Open XML SDK 2.0 we actually shipped a hands on lab, that walks you through the mark-up capability and extensibility constructs, how to use them and in particular how to use them with the Open XML SDK so we will link to that below this transcript.

For MCE content click here.