[Info-vax] OT: Rob Short: Operating System Evolution

[FrankS]

On Jan 8, 5:57 pm, Chris Scheers <ch... at applied-synergy.com> wrote:
> I find it interesting that it was possible to retrofit .docx file on
> Word 2000.  This seems to imply that there haven't been any significant
> capabilities added to the file format since then.
>

Not necessarily.

Making a change to Word 2000 so that it can generate something that
can be read by Word 2007 is trivial, because Word 2007 already reads
Word 2000 files.  The only thing that would need to be introduced to
support a "Save As .DOCX" is the ZIP file wrapper, throw in the native
Word 2000 .doc file, and some XML that says, "hey, this thing contains
an older format file".  Word 2007 would need only check the XML file,
realize that there's a Word 2000 format .doc file in there, and then
translate the .doc to XML on the fly.

Just because Word 2000 can generate a .docx file which contains
sufficient information to tell Word 2007 how to process it doesn't
mean there isn't any new functionality in a Word 2007 file.  Consider
all the possible XML tags that would describe new functionality in
Word 2007 which Word 2000 wouldn't be able to handle at all.

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