Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

5 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 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.