XML Reference Guide

Mar 14, 2003

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Microsoft Office 2003's big claim to fame -- at least as far as I was concerned -- was the addition of support for XML. As far as Word 2003 is concerned, this support for falls into two categories: the ability to edit XML documents, and the ability to save an actual Word Document in WordProcessingML (AKA WordML), which enables you to preserve all of the formatting and other information you need to recreate the Word document later.

It's this second capability we're interested in now.

In earlier versions of Word, if you wanted to analyze the content of a Word document, you could add styles, save it as HTML, and then jump through about a dozen flaming hoops to turn that HTML into XML you could then analyze. (Can you tell I've been there, done that?

Word 2003 makes it easier, in that you don't have to kill yourself to get well-focused XML, but unless you understand the thinking behind it, WordML can seem impossibly couplex. Fortunately, once you do understand the general thinking, it's pretty straightforward, so let's go ahead and take a look at it.

The first thing you have to understand is the overall hierarchy of objects. It works like this: A document is made up of paragraphs. A paragraph is made up of text runs. A text run is made up of pieces of text. (There are other objects, of course, such as drawings and lists, but we'll worry about them in future columns.) That means we can create a very simple document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument 
    xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/wordml">

   <w:body>

      <w:p>
         <w:r>
            <w:t>WordML -- XML in Microsoft Word 2003</w:t>
         </w:r>

      </w:p>

   </w:body>

</w:wordDocument>

Notice that in the body of the document, we've got a paragraph that contains a single text run, which contains a single string of text.

Notice also the use of the namespace and processing instruction. The latter tells Microsoft Windows to use Word to open the document, the former tells Word how to treat it. If you have Word 2003, you can use it to open the document, as you can see in Figure 1.

Of course, this is of limited use in the real world, where there's formatting (and more than one paragraph, as a general rule) involved. For example, we'd like this title to be big, bold, and centered. To do that, we can add style information to the paragraph:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument 
    xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/wordml">

   <w:body>

      <w:p>

         <w:pPr>
             <w:spacing w:before="240" w:after="60"/>
             <w:jc w:val="center"/>
         </w:pPr>
         <w:r>
            <w:t>WordML -- XML in Microsoft Word 2003</w:t>

         </w:r>
      </w:p>

   </w:body>

</w:wordDocument>

That centers the text, as in Figure 2:

In this case, we're dealing with a "paragraph" style -- in other words, you can apply it to one word, but it will affect the whole paragraph -- so we added it using the pPr element. By adding it at the start of the paragraph, we're specifying that information takes effect for the whole paragraph. You can also add "character" style information to text runs using the rPr element. For example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument 
    xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/wordml">

   <w:body>

      <w:p>
         <w:pPr>
             <w:spacing w:before="240" w:after="60"/>
             <w:jc w:val="center"/>

         </w:pPr>
         <w:r>
            <w:rPr>
               <w:rFonts w:ascii="Arial" w:h-ansi="Arial" w:cs="Arial"/>
               <w:b/>
               <w:kern w:val="32"/>

               <w:sz w:val="32"/>
            </w:rPr>
            <w:t>WordML -- XML in Microsoft Word 2003</w:t>
         </w:r>
      </w:p>

   </w:body>

</w:wordDocument>

You can see the results in Figure 3:

Now, strictly speaking, you can do any formating you need this way, but there isn't any way to understand what any of the content represents. For example, there's no way to know the headline is a headline, rather than simply a large block of text. Of course, WordML is part of a word processing program, dp if there was ever a time to favor presentation over structure, this is it. But that doesn't mean we have to settle for it.

No, instead, we can create styles and apply them to specific parts of the document. For example, we have 3 different styles in this document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument 
    xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/wordml" 
>

<w:styles>
   <w:style w:type="paragraph" w:default="on" w:styleId="Normal">
      <w:name w:val="Normal"/>
      <w:rPr>

          <w:sz w:val="24"/>
      </w:rPr>
   </w:style>
   <w:style w:type="paragraph" w:styleId="CenteredHeading1">
      <w:name w:val="Centered Heading One"/>
      <w:basedOn w:val="Normal"/>

      <w:next w:val="Normal"/>
      <w:pPr>
          <w:spacing w:before="240" w:after="60"/>
          <w:jc w:val="center"/>
      </w:pPr>
      <w:rPr>

          <w:rFonts w:ascii="Arial" w:h-ansi="Arial" w:cs="Arial"/>
          <w:b/>
          <w:kern w:val="32"/>
          <w:sz w:val="32"/>
      </w:rPr>
   </w:style>

   <w:style w:type="character" w:styleId="Callout">
      <w:name w:val="Callout"/>
      <w:basedOn w:val="Normal"/>
      <w:next w:val="Normal"/>
      <w:rPr>
          <w:b/>

          <w:i/>
      </w:rPr>
   </w:style>
</w:styles>
<w:body>

      <w:p>

         <w:pPr>
            <w:pStyle w:val="CenteredHeading1"/>
         </w:pPr>
         <w:r>
            <w:t>WordML -- XML in Microsoft Word 2003</w:t>

         </w:r>
      </w:p>
      <w:p/>
      <w:p>
         <w:r>
            <w:t>Microsoft Office 2003's big claim to fame -- at least as far as I
was concerned -- was the addition of support for XML.
As far as Word 2003 is concerned, this support for falls into two
categories: the ability to edit XML documents, and
the ability to save an actual Word Document in  

</w:t>
         </w:r>
         <w:r>
            <w:rPr>
                <w:i/>
            </w:rPr>

            <w:t>Word Processing ML</w:t>
         </w:r>
         <w:r>
            <w:t>, which enables you to preserve all of the formatting and other
information you need to recreate the Word
document later.</w:t>
         </w:r>

       </w:p>
       <w:p/>
       <w:p>
          <w:pPr>
             <w:jc w:val="center"/>
          </w:pPr>

          <w:r>
             <w:rPr>
                 <w:rStyle w:val="Callout"/>
             </w:rPr>
             <w:t>It's this second capability we're interested in now.</w:t>

          </w:r>
       </w:p>
       <w:p/>
       <w:p>
          <w:r>
             <w:t>In earlier versions of Word, if you wanted to analyze the
content of a Word document, you could add styles, save
it as HTML, and then jump through about a dozen flaming hoops
to turn that HTML into XML you could then
analyze.  (Can you tell I've been there, done that?)</w:t>

          </w:r>
      </w:p>
      <w:p/>

</w:body>
</w:wordDocument>

We've got several items of note here. First notice that you identify a style two ways. The name is what appears in the "style" pulldown in Word, while the styleId is what you use to actually assign styles content, as you can see in Figure 4:

The advantage of setting styles this way is that you can go in later with an XSLT style sheet and convert the presentation information into structure information, no flaming hoops required.

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