Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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..

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com