With all due respect, Mr. Dvorak, you should stick to spinning tales of your Mac woes.

In his PCMag.com column this week, John C. Dvorak takes a whack at Microsoft Office 2003's XML support.

Read Dvorak's Latest Anti-MSFT Missive

"Now we are seeing news stories that say Microsoft is actually focusing on XML as a semi-proprietary format that will have all the same bugaboos we have with the .DOC format. Something called WordML may replace XML. Here we go again!" opines Dvorak.

Where to start with this sentence? Problem One: Dvorak is basing his comments on a growing number of mostly misinformed reports that Microsoft is pulling back from its XML commitments with the next version of its desktop Office suite due out later this summer.

Problem Two: WordML is Microsoft's format for saving XML presentation data. Microsoft doesn't want it to replace XML. It is there for folks who want to save their Office data in the XML format. WordXML has nothing to do with storing customer-defined schema. Nor was it supposed to.

Dvorak's not the only one spouting wrong-headed rhetoric on this topic. Even generally accurate Microsoft observers have grabbed the wrong end of the stick.

"Microsoft has made a curious choice," cries The Register in a recent (and uncharacteristically misdirected) diatribe. "It has backed away from implementing an OASIS-defined industry standard by flying a populist flag. Microsoft will offer 'freedom' to its users by letting them roll their own schemas."

More Jingoism: Writing History with Microsoft's XML Lock-In

Hmmm. I may just be befuddled, but I don't recall Microsoft committing to that OASIS standard. OpenOffice.org did. Sun did with StarOffice. But did Microsoft?

And Microsoft is, indeed, letting customers roll their own schemas—in the two most popular versions of Office: the high-end SKUs aimed at IT professionals. These are the folks most likely to build their own XML schema. Do you see your home Office user rolling his or her own? Possible, sure. But highly unlikely.

Lest you think your trusty MS Watcher has gone soft on Microsoft, I do think Microsoft's failure to convey its Office packaging strategy clearly is the biggest reason for this misinformation around XML.

Microsoft should have just come clean at the outset and said it planned to provide the ability to accommodate customer-defined schemas only in its high-end Office 2003 SKUs. Instead, Redmond remained ambiguous on this point until a month ago. And now this ambiguity is coming back to bite it.

What do you think? Are folks just jumping on the Microsoft-bashing bandwagon on this Office XML issue? Or am I really missing something here?

Write me at mswatch@ziffdavis.com and let me know what you think.