Matt Watson

>>I like that Office 2003 saves files in an XML format
Nope, the support is scarce, except for Word 2003. And even that is only partially a round-trip due to that OLE streams are left as binary base64-encoded xml fragments.


>>why not have it automatically compress the saved xml data?
Well, isn't this the definition of the original binary file format?
Xml is just way more bloated, (and not round-trip), so you need to zip the stuff. If you zip the stuff in the xml itself, then you've lost all benefits of xml. xml compression should happen at the transport level, not at the application level. What Microsoft is doing is not really compressing xml, what they are doing is packaging. That is supposed to enables programming scenarios that binary formats didn't allow so far (well, that 's what the marketing brochure says, since there are tons of ISVs out there that do just that).

Good idea, from what I hear that's how the Office 12 file formats work. Check out Channel9 for more details on that, but it looks like the docx and other formats are the new XML schema + ZIP compression & packaging.

This sounds cool, I think XML is going to be very popular at some point in the future, thank you vinbuddy!