Word 11 XML. Jon Udell (via Brad) is talking about XML support in the upcoming version of Office. It is cool that Raikes is making some of this public, since it's hard not to talk about it. I've been using Office 11 on my machine for about 6 months now (dog food is the best food), and I can testify that what Jon saw is really there and pretty stable, and not just “demoware”. I am sure that the average Office user is not going to care too much about “supports XML” when they make the purchasing decision, and at first it seems to be no big deal (another file format?). In fact, it is no big deal to use, because 90% of the time you have no clue you are using it. The whole Office suite has married semistructured data and document authoring in a natural and unobtrusive manner, the way it's supposed to be. And I'm still stumbling across really cool things that I can do “for free” as a result of this support. Now I am just crossing my fingers that in another year, most people will see this functionality, not as a hot new feature, but as a basic level of support that they would expect of any document processing software. [Better Living Through Software]