This article, and much of the reporting on this case, is very confused as to what it's actually about. The case actually has to do with a feature called "custo

This article, and much of the reporting on this case, is very confused as to what it's actually about. The case actually has to do with a feature called "custom XML" which was introduced in Office 2003 (I think?) and basically allows databinding between Office docs and XML files with some custom schema. You have some data represented in XML, and it shows up in a Word doc presented in a certain way. Then you can edit the Word doc through the Word interface, and the data in the XML will match your changes. So the idea is to let you use Office as an editor for structured data. I dunno how well it worked in practice. The actual patent claim was over some detail of how the databinding relationship was represented in the file format. This has nothing to do with the XML formats introduced in Office 2007 (.docx etc.)