Are all MS Word documents serialized in an XML readable format?
Short answer: no. Long answer: Upon each few releases, MS changed the format for word documents. Thus Word 6.0 to 95 use a format, Word 97 to 2002 (a.k.a. XP) use another, 2003 another, and 2007 yet another one. Of course, each version can save and open documents in older formats (although newer features can’t normally be saved on such older formats). The formats up to 2003 (.doc) are incremental upgrades of the previous ones, and are binary based. The format introduced with Office 2007 (.docx) is XML-based, and was forced as an ISO Standard “ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Office Open XML”, although word itself is not fully compliant with that standard. Note that Word 2007 can still save (and open) documents in older, binary formats. Hope this helps.
