Phil, I have to mostly agree with djackson above. The editorial almost sounds like whining about the disparities of transmittable data formats. A "universal" data format has been tried and failed miserably more times than I care to mention. True CSV. EDI. XML. All failures in my eyes and all tremendous successes in the eyes of those that praise them. Heh... why not try something like DBIII table files which was actually better than any format I've come across so far because it had built in metadata by column instead of by element like XML does.

Do I think we should keep looking for a more universal, metadata and format rich format? Absolutely because, right now, you can't even just copy and paste between MS products without something going wrong. :hehe:

In the meantime, let the spirit of competition thrive in the data transmission arena. To do otherwise is almost like wanting all SQL languages to be the same... there’d be no competition and no incentive for improvement. 🙂