[SideburnsOfDoom]

> AFAIK, the Word .doc also started (and unfortunately continued) as basically a not-so-designed memory dump

This may be true but not the whole story. It's the reason why the MS office team bit the bullet and replaced .doc with .docx about 5 years ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

Docx is basically XML in a zip file. It's a beast and has lots of compromises for backward compatibility, but as a design starting point, "zipped XML" is far far better than a binary dump of the in-memory data.

[lucian1900]

It's still worse than ODT (which itself isn't exactly pretty), for no good reason. That's sad.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

ODT is also XML-based, to Docx's problems compared to ODT can't be blamed on XML.

[lucian1900]

I never said it has anything to do with XML. OOXML is extremely complex for little reason. Even though it is also quite complex, ODT is much, much simpler.

[makomk]

There are actually reasons for some of OOXML's weirdness, just not good ones. For instance, it appears the reason why OOXML is pretty much the only XML-based document format which doesn't use a mixed content model is because there's a huge amount of prior art that'd have made it impossible to patent if they had. (Microsoft tried anyway though.)

[SideburnsOfDoom]

I'm not disagreeing with you; but the context is mostly about the use of XML.