Recent patent applications filed by Microsoft are routine moves and don"t reflect a change in the company"s position on Extensible Markup Language, according to a spokesman for the software maker.
As previously reported, Microsoft has filed applications for numerous XML-related patents in the United States, Europe and New Zealand. The patents deal with the way its Office software processes XML, the fast-growing standard for exchanging data among disparate computing systems. XML-based capabilities have been one of the main selling points for Office 2003, the recently released version of Microsoft"s market-leading productivity package. By saving documents as XML files, Office allows back-end computing systems, such as corporate databases, to retrieve and reuse data from those documents. XML support also allows Office to become a client for viewing and manipulating data from Web services and from complex enterprise applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) software.