Well, that's OOXML. MS chose to employ the pure content model, so that text nodes and elements cannot be mixed as children of a root element. That leads to mons

Well, that's OOXML. MS chose to employ the pure content model, so that text nodes and elements cannot be mixed as children of a root element. That leads to monstrosities like this (I forgot the actual element names, so I made them up): <p> <t>This is not bold.</t> <t><b>This is.</b></t> <t>This isn't.</t> </p> In a mixed content model schema, you could omit the extraneous <t> elements and just directly embed text nodes: <p> This is isn't bold. <b>This is.</b> This isn't either. </p> That's just one of the many ways in which MS misused XML to make things worse instead of better.