Foolestroupe -

All recent Word documents have carried a .doc file extension - until now. Early files, perhaps back to Word97, were essentially a "text file with simple tags," with the mostly-hidden tags giving the format information.

More recent documents have still used the .doc extension, but were "sort of" - "almost" - "kind of like" - html in the use of more complex tags. They weren't "pure anything" but the "text" still could be fairly easily extracted and some of the simpler formatting was easy to convert.

You may be seeing "Word 2007" files on the web. I've run into a few. The default format for Word 2007 carries a .docx file extension in pure "Word form" and the innards are entirely(?) based on "XML." Microsoft ".NET" methods can also be applied to produce the "Microsoft replacement for .pdf" but offhand I don't even remember what the file extension(s) are for the various "flavors" that may be found.

Word 2007 - the latest - also supports "four character" file extensions, but I haven't gotten through enough research to identify more than a very few. It claims that it recognizes and treats .htm files differently than .html files, although documentation I've seen thus far is vague about what the specific differences in handling are. (I seem to recall seeing an actual .xtml file on one website recently, that my IE handled okay. ????)

All of the "recently older" Office programs can download "import filters" to allow them to open and read the .docx (and similar other formats from other Office programs) and separate "export filters" are being released by Microsoft to allow some older programs to save files in the new formats. The import filters I've tried out appear to work okay, if you can get past the baby-talk in the snotty warnings that "you'll die if you don't get new Office." I'm less convinced that the export filters thus far available are "fully stable" but haven't really tried them out much.

If you're using something other than Office, it would be expected that updates will eventually be available to provide similar import/export filters, but I suspect that many alternative programs will need some time to get them ready to go.

A few of these "new" files may be viewable in your browser, if you can force them to open there. (You might even try changing the file extension on copies of a few files to try that.) The appearance of the new files on the web - at a few sites - and (mostly) successful handling of them by my IE suggests that the browsers may be "ahead of the curve" - or at least closer to it - for providing some degree of usability.

Among Microsoft products, IE is about the closest thing there is to a "universal reader" and actually does a surprisingly good job with quite a few "foreign" file types where one wouldn't expect much; although there are also many other filetypes that it just won't load.

John