Strangely, I am with Michael on this. No, its not the effect of too much
G&T (no tonic in the house and anyway
I want to be awake to watch The Rock on TV tonight), but the same
feeling as him that Microsoft must
necessarily (since they employ really clever folk) sometimes do
something right. And the signs are that Word 2003
does what it does better than OpenOffice. No, its not an editor suited
suited to deep structural encoding
of manuscript transcriptions. Yes, it offers a plausible and
well-thought through system for authoring shallower texts.

Had I but time enough, Horatio, I'd be asking for a slot at the upcoming
TEI members meeting
to demonstrate work at Oxford using Office 2003 & TEI by our Zoology
colleague Robin McCleery;
but its still too raw, sadly.

It'll be interesting to see how Mr Microsoft reacts to the now undoubted
fact that Mozilla have got
clear blue water between them and IE6 in the quality browser wars. Maybe
they can put some
quality back into IE?

Sebastian

PS I studied Henrik Ibsen for English Literature 'A' level at school,
and it always puzzled  me.
Why didn't they give us the great Berthold Brecht as well? I suppose in
those paranoid days when the UK
the USA thought the whole world was in a conspiracy to attack them
(thank god we don't have
any nonsense like that now eh) we couldn't be seen to study evil
communist authors. The parallel now is the
movement in schools in England now to phase out the zero, as being an
evil Arab invention.