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MS Office XML Format Now In TextEdit

Posted by timothy on from the beating-vs-joining dept.

computerdude33 writes "Apparently, Apple heard of Microsoft Office changing to XML formats. If you have OS X 10.4.2, you can save documents in TextEdit in Word XML Format. They are saved with a *.xml extension, and are riddled with references to Word. Here is an example of one of these documents."

6 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. in case you're curious... by ubiquitin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So a simple two word text file has the following 33 XML tags pasted here with the greater and less than signs removed...


    ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?
    ?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?
    w:wordDocument xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/ 2003/2/wordml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:w10="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:SL="http://schemas.microsoft.com/schemaLibra ry/2003/2/core" xmlns:aml="http://schemas.microsoft.com/aml/2001/c ore" xmlns:wx="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word /2003/2/auxHint" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C1488 2" xmlns:st1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smartt ags" xml:space="preserve"o:DocumentProperties/o:Documen tPropertiesw:fontsw:defaultFonts w:ascii="Times New Roman" w:fareast="Times New Roman" w:h-ansi="Times New Roman" w:cs="Times New Roman"//w:fontsw:docPr/w:docPrw:bodywx:sectw:pw:pP r/w:pPrw:rw:rPrw:rFonts w:ascii="Helvetica" w:h-ansi="Helvetica" w:cs="Helvetica"/wx:font wx:val="Helvetica"/w:sz w:val="24"/w:sz-cs w:val="24"//w:rPrw:tHot time!/w:t/w:r/w:pw:sectPrw:pgSz w:w="12240" w:h="15840"/w:pgMar w:top="1440" w:right="1440" w:bottom="1440" w:left="1440"//w:sectPr/wx:sect/w:body/w:wordDocum ent

    --
    http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
    1. Re:in case you're curious... by ubiquitin · · Score: 2, Interesting


      Well, sir, you made the point nicely. Although the HTML file that I came up with in vi came in at around 48 bytes. The 33 tags that TextEditor produces for doc-like-XML is actually a pretty compact way of describing a document along with formatting.

      Here's my $.02 on the bigger picture here: instead of fighting about document formats with Microsoft, we will now be fighting over XML data structures. Same old bully, just a different playground.

      --
      http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
    2. Re:in case you're curious... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      what kind of html did you write to get 2700 bytes? Using XHTML and a version of CSS 3 (which, yes, is not yet supported by anything, but is an example of how to model this sort of stuff) I got


      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
      <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
                      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd ">
      <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
      <head>
              <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
              <title>Untitled</title>
              <meta name="generator" content="BBEdit 8.2" />
      <style type="text/css" title="text/css"> /* <!{CDATA{ */

            @media print and (width: 8.5in) and (height: 11in) {
                  @page {
                          margin: 1in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;
                  }
            }
      body {font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman";}
      p {font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; text-indent: 5em;}
      span.001 {font-size: 24pt; font-family: Arial;} /* ]]> */
      </style>
      </head>
      <body>
      <p><span class="001">Hot time!</span></p>
      </body>
      </html>

      882 bytes. Note that to be fair I left in a reference to the text editor I used (and which supplied the base template) and defined the phrase as a non-standard font. Still just 882 bytes. What are you using, FrontPage??

    3. Re:in case you're curious... by Tim+Browse · · Score: 3, Interesting

      XML files can be a little ungainly if you want to partially update them, or just append data. Binary files can be better for this (note: 'can').

      As is evidenced by the lovely pause that happens whenever I close an MSN Messenger window of someone I chat to often, and it appends the chat history to the 1.5Mb XML file, by reading/writing the whole XML file again....wugga wugga wugga.

      (Either that, or their append code sucks!)

      But other than that, yes. The size argument doesn't stand up - a counter-intuitive result, but seems to be true. Especially when you start zipping XML files.

  2. .xml? by Stuart+Gibson · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I understood that the new office XML formats had an extension the same as the original with an x at the end, as in .docx.

    Possibly this was a wrapper for the format to encapsulate images etc? Can anyone who has actually looked at this clarify?

    Thanks,
    Stuart

    --
    It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
  3. Re:terrible moderation by That's+Unpossible! · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't see where XML files are bigger than RTF. I just performed a test, and the RTF file was 3 times as large as the XML file.

    --
    Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.