I think he was talking about the classic .doc format which was a clusterfuck and not the open XML.
If I remember correctly the XML format was just an XML-encoded version of the binary counterpart. Including all or most of the bugs and weird hacks.
with the previous format being essentially a memory dump, i'd say that's progress
That’s correct - I worked with MS team that documented old formats, and they said that sometimes they don’t have people left who knew what specific struct was intended for - although that was mostly for people PowerPoint and Visio, excel and word was better documented
Actually Excel was the only one that had official, freely available documentation for the old (now legacy) file format.
You don't remember correctly. Word's docx format is far more intelligent than openoffice ODT, despite propaganda to the contrary. With one exception: word's zip files don't have a convenient magic header. The way it works with ODT, and a bunch of other formats is that you put an uncompressed identifier file (`mimetype`) as the first entry inside your zipfile. At byte 30 (of your zipfile) you then get `mimetype$THE_MIMEMETYPE`. This is a nice trick and works for any zip-based format. Sadly, docx does not do that so you have to go by file extension or look at (more of) the contents of the zipfile.
IIRC the original doc (and xls) formats were unwieldy mainly because of performance requirements. In order to save and load fast they were basically a bunch of binary dumped structs.
I'm not saying it's beautiful, but isn't Ms-Word's internal format basically a series of XML files that are zipped up?
The old .Doc and .xls files were a bad format, but my understanding is that since Office 2007 the format is generally much better.
To be fair the old doc format was conceived in DOS era and memory efficiency was a primer back in the days.
and if they hadn't waited so long to update to a sane file format no one would complain but they waited until 2007 to fix the format long after the dos era memory excuse had long ceased to be an issue. even then they only did it to allow them to shoe horn their format in as the iso standard after one was already selected bribing there way through the process.
Ms office files prior to office 2007 were mostly memory dumps of specific components, wrapped into composite files aka OLE2 storage - their content varied depending on office versions and often locale
Its a wonder alternative editors ever supported the format..