Interactive office documents: a new face for web 2.0 applications

As the world wide web transforms from a vehicle of information dissemination and e-commerce transactions into a writable nexus of human collaboration, the Web 2.0 technologies at the forefront of the tranformation may be seen as special cases of a more general shift in the conceptual application model of the web. This paper recognizes the conceptual transition and explores the connections to a new class of interactive office documents that become possible by tighter integration of the Open Document Format with the W3C's next generation web forms technology (XForms). The connections transcend simple provisioning of office document editing and persistence capabilities on the web. Rather, the advantages of office documents as self-contained entities that flow through a collaborative network or business process are combined with web application qualities such as intelligent behavioral interaction, in-process web service access, and control of server submission content. An office document mashup called 'Dual Forms' is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of office document centric web applications.