Sun StarOffice has chosen a XML vocabulary as its native file format and the first reactions on xml-dev have been to applaud both the idea and its implementation.

In a post to xml-dev, Robin Cover had noted the new file format as an interesting XML application.

Daniel Veillard followed by giving more technical details on the architecture used by StarOffice to read and write their XML documents and positive feedback on the usage made of XML:

• [they] make serious use of namespaces, all elements are in a well defined namespace, there is multiple namespaces depending on the semantic of the elements/attributes
• the generated XML looks clean though there is a bit of style extra information stored even if not used
• their namespace support is done in a clean way (i.e. one can change the prefix string and the app still recognizes it :-)
• they can import document with extra namespaces, but they can't save the unknown part (this generates a message at save time which seems to indicate that those information are kept in the internal document model which is a Good Thing, because it's probably easy to fix :-)

The sources of Sun's StarOffice are now available under GNU General Public License (GPL), GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), and Sun Industry Standard Source License (SISSL).

Robin Cover has also created a dedicated page for StarOffice on his renowned Cover Pages.