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I enjoyed reading your article about XML support in Office 2003.

Here are some points regarding Word 2003's XML support that you didn't mention. These apply to the case where you are loading a pure XML file (not WordML) and then saving it back as a pure XML file (they call it "data only").

- It will lose all XML Comments.

- It will lose all XML Processing Instructions that are inside the root element.

- It does not honor special attributes like xml:space="preserve". It will mistakenly lose newlines inside such attributes. Also, when saving back to disk, these special attributes will be lost.

- It has problems with whitespace handling. Markup like this...

This is <bold>very</bold> important.

will come in and get saved as this...

This is<bold>very</bold>important.

So, in general, if Word opens some arbitrary XML file and then saves it back to disk, it will horribly corrupt it in most cases.

Thought you might be interested in these items.