
Ask HN: Why did Microsoft not use HTML as the format for its word documents? - abs222
What&#x27;s the difference between using doc vs. HTML as a document format? Why did Microsoft not use HTML instead of inventing doc format?
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greenyoda
Because Microsoft Word came out in 1983 and HTML didn't exist until 1993. Not
to mention that early versions of HTML were pretty limited (CSS didn't come
out until late 1996).

Also, a binary format like .doc is much more compact and faster/easier to
parse, and in the 80's and 90's, computers had much less memory and processing
power than they have today.

Today's Microsoft Office formats are based on XML - a .docx/.xlsx/.pptx file
is a zip archive containing a directory tree of XML files (plus some binary
data such as bitmap images).

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tomhoward
Microsoft started using XML-based document file formats in the early 2000s,
and adopted Office Open XML in 2007. XML is like HTML but not limited to web-
page markup.

The reason it wasn't always the case was that the .doc format was initially
developed before HTML and XML.

The first version of Microsoft's .doc format was developed in 1983.

HTML was released in around 1991, after being developed through the late 90s,
and XML emerged in the late 90s.

To be fair, Microsoft was reasonably fast to move to XML-based formats once it
was clear XML was becoming an industry standard.

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ankurdhama
People will come up with all sorts of opinions about this but if you want to
find the actual answer for this question then you need to ask someone who was
in the control of deciding about the doc format when it was first invented.

