This doesn't sound unlike the Office file formats. Apache's POI project named its Office binary reader/writers HSSF and HWPF, acronyms for Horrible SpreadSheet format and Horrible Word Processing Format respectively. IIRC, they are basically serializations of the in-memory structures used by Office. This choice was made when a powerful Windows machine had less than four megs of RAM and manipulation of document data by a 33 mhz processor could take significant time. Of course, like Windows, Microsoft chose backward compatibility over forward movement -- a wise economic choice, at least in the short term.
