4 ms·

Funnily enough you can see what a word doc looks like because the x in .docx is “XML” so save the word doc as .html and bask in the flaming dumpster fire of the

Funnily enough you can see what a word doc looks like because the x in .docx is “XML” so save the word doc as .html and bask in the flaming dumpster fire of the font definitions at the top inline CSS.

fault1 5y ago
Yes, versus the old school .doc format, pre-xml, which was a proprietary format, but was reverse engineered by most of Microsoft's rivals. at least wordperfect had pretty good support. I think Microsoft introduced .docx in what? Office.NET.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
I was in a class where week one was “create a blog to keep track of the rest of the projects this semester” and for many of us, no big deal, static site generator, pick a theme for a wordpress, whatever. One of my classmates tho had never touched HTML and was super stressed about the assignment until they stumbled upon the fact the Word can export HTML - and its easy enough to highlight text and add hyperlinks to other html website so, bingo, whole semester’s work published in Word. Yes the auto-generated markup is horrendous but it gets the job done, full marks.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  If you dig deep enough, Word can still directly publish to blog sites such as WordPress using the MetaWeblog API as well as native SharePoint publishing (but who uses that?!)
ianmcgowan 5y ago
Well, actually :-) docx is a zipped container, so if you rename it as .zip and open that up, you can see the xml files inside there. No need to save as, it's all right there as OpenXML [1]. If you save the doc as xml, there's some overlap, but that's an older technology called WordML [2]. I've spent way too much time creating spreadsheets on ancient legacy unix systems, in dozens of different ways. OpenXML is not the easiest, but it is the best of a lot of bad options... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats
mattowen_uk 5y ago
There is a 'Web Page, Filtered' Save As option in Word, which saves the document in MUCH cleaner HTML than the standard 'Web Page' version. Granted, it's not as good as it could be, but it's definitely way better. It's clean and predicable enough to run it through stuff like PanDoc and get acceptable results.
tentacleuno 5y ago
I believe .pptx (PowerPoint) files are ZIP's, too. Try changing a .pptx file to .zip.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  Every Office file format ending in an X is a .zip file. Got inspired from Open/LibreOffice's file formats heavily.

fault1 5y ago

Yes, versus the old school .doc format, pre-xml, which was a proprietary format, but was reverse engineered by most of Microsoft's rivals. at least wordperfect had pretty good support. I think Microsoft introduced .docx in what? Office.NET.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

I was in a class where week one was “create a blog to keep track of the rest of the projects this semester” and for many of us, no big deal, static site generator, pick a theme for a wordpress, whatever. One of my classmates tho had never touched HTML and was super stressed about the assignment until they stumbled upon the fact the Word can export HTML - and its easy enough to highlight text and add hyperlinks to other html website so, bingo, whole semester’s work published in Word. Yes the auto-generated markup is horrendous but it gets the job done, full marks.

mattowen_uk 5y ago
If you dig deep enough, Word can still directly publish to blog sites such as WordPress using the MetaWeblog API as well as native SharePoint publishing (but who uses that?!)

ianmcgowan 5y ago

Well, actually :-) docx is a zipped container, so if you rename it as .zip and open that up, you can see the xml files inside there. No need to save as, it's all right there as OpenXML [1]. If you save the doc as xml, there's some overlap, but that's an older technology called WordML [2]. I've spent way too much time creating spreadsheets on ancient legacy unix systems, in dozens of different ways. OpenXML is not the easiest, but it is the best of a lot of bad options... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats

mattowen_uk 5y ago

There is a 'Web Page, Filtered' Save As option in Word, which saves the document in MUCH cleaner HTML than the standard 'Web Page' version. Granted, it's not as good as it could be, but it's definitely way better. It's clean and predicable enough to run it through stuff like PanDoc and get acceptable results.

tentacleuno 5y ago

I believe .pptx (PowerPoint) files are ZIP's, too. Try changing a .pptx file to .zip.

bayindirh 5y ago
Every Office file format ending in an X is a .zip file. Got inspired from Open/LibreOffice's file formats heavily.