Word Document Structure Explained

By going the all-XML approach, Microsoft has made it much easier to understand the structure of Word documents and how the various “stories” and elements interact.  Brian Jones has an excellent post about the basics of the Word document structure and then goes further by showing how that structure translates into the Open XML format.  Things are so much easier now, assuming good document production processes and good document formatting.  It also looks like it’ll be easier to “fix” malformed documents.  This will hopefully lead to a number of quality tools that are less expensive than solutions from Microsystems or Levit & James.