From:	 Louis Suarez-Potts <luispo@mac.com>
To:	 "discuss-openoffice.org" <discuss@openoffice.org>,
	 <announce@openoffice.org>
Subject: [announce] Newsletter #5
Date:	 Sun, 21 Apr 2002 15:01:20 -0700

Newsletter #5

Apologies for the neglect and delay in getting this Number Five out! As many
of you might know, we've been rather busy arranging things for the upcoming
release of OpenOffice.org 1.0. For me, the work has included tabulating the
vote (still ongoing; if you want results faster, help me), and making sure
that the homepage and download page are actually intelligible to the
uninitiated.

But the advent of 1.0 is not the only thing that has been involving the
OpenOffice.org community. We have just finished moving the Marketing Project
to its new home (http://marketing.openoffice.org/), creating the new lang
projects (see http://lang.openoffice.org/ for updates), and renewing the
Website Project. 

As the name suggests, the Website project concerns itself with the "look"
and architecture of OpenOffice.org. Our mandate now is to improve these
important features. As many of you are aware, the site navigates poorly
(think: labyrinth) and seems designed to convince you that you need reading
glasses. Well, we'd like to fix these issues. If you are remotely talented
with CSS, HTML, or have a good sense of what you think needs fixing and know
how (or are willing to learn), please join the project and mailing list. You
can subscribe from the project homepage, http://website.openoffice.org/)

To me, it's obvious that OpenOffice.org is right now undergoing an explosion
of activity, much of it sponsored by users who want to add to the project
and who want to further OpenOffice.org's global availability. But,
complementing the end-user activity, the technical projects have also being
seeing a surge of work. I would like in particular to point attention to the
XML project (http://xml.openoffice.org).

What does the XML Project do? Lead by Michael Bauer, the project "contains
support for and implementation of the XML based file format"; and its
mission is "to create an open and ubiquitous XML-based file format for
office documents and to provide an open reference implementation for this
format." Why is this important? Let's put it this way: One of the things
that makes OpenOffice.org product distinct and flexible is its XML-based
file format. This means that it can work well with other XML-ready
applications and it means that it is far abler to take advantage of the
global swing to XML than other office suites (yes, that one).

To give an idea of just how flexible XML makes OpenOffice.org, here are the
core goals, as listed on the XML homepage:

**The file format should be developed in such a way that it will be accepted
by the community and can be placed under community control for future
development and format evolution.

**The file formats should be suitable for all office types: text processing,
spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, charting, and math.

**The file formats should reuse portions of each other as much as possible
(so for example a spreadsheet table definition can work also as a text
processing table definition).

If you have more question, you may want to start with the XML FAQS,
http://xml.openoffice.org/faq.html.

Of course, As with any developer-centric project, most of the work takes
place in the mailing list, and the XML list is persistently one of the more
active developer lists. To view archives, please go to
http://xml.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=dev.

As always, there is an html version of this newsletter on the site,
http://www.openoffice.org/editorial/newsletter5.html.

Louis Suarez-Potts
Community Manager
OpenOffice.org
louis@collab.net 



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