The big news late last night was Microsoft's announcement that XML would be the default file format for the next version of Office. Quite a bit of blogging/discussion going on about this today. Steve wonders if this means a 'Save as RSS' option will be coming soon? For the more technical aspects of the discusion I turn to somebody like Stephen O'Grady who pulls in a variety of opinions on his blog.

My question is, will this new standard be similar to the nightmare that was/is Office's 'Save as HTML' command? Any web developer who has received 'web pages' from clients that were created in Word knows what I am talking about. The HTML is so full of inline style tags that it's a nightmare of code bloat (yes I am calling HTML code....shoot me).

I hope that some of the standards-gurus will be able to tell me if this is a good thing or a wolf in sheep's clothing.