If they DO have sense, all future applications will exchange their data in XML.
The future might give us word processors, spreadsheet applications and databases that can read each other's data in a pure text format, without any conversion utilities in between.
We can only pray that Microsoft and all the other software vendors will agree.
he syntax rules of XML are very simple and very strict. The rules are very easy to learn, and very easy to use.
Because of this, creating software that can read and manipulate XML is very easy.