Re: The sky is starting to fall again

Subject: Re: The sky is starting to fall again
From: Bill Lawrence <lawrence -at- mayaviz -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 16:08:15 -0400


keith -at- soltys -dot- ca wrote:

As far as I know, WordML is a functionally complete description of the
Word document format in XML. It's been stated on the word-pc mailing list
(by someone from Microsoft if I remember correctly), that saving a Word
file as XML and then converting back to .doc format is a good way of
removing corruption in a Word document (bad binary indexes and the like),
but you don't lose anything in the file. I have done this with fairly
complex documents and have not found anything to be lost.


If you take a look at a WordML file, you'll see that it's really an XML implementation of something along the lines of an RTF file. The formatting is inextricably bound to the content. So, while it is technically an XML file that doesn't buy us much.

Essentially what it boils down to is that WordML was created to preserve
the format of the document, not the structure.

Well put. It's yet another attempt to keep everyone in the Microsoft tool chain. One might even say that it is an attempt to keep as many documents as unstructured as possible.

Cheers,

Bill



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