Gripe 3: Word XML (Issue 4)
This is my final entry on this subject at this time. Thanks for the emails with further suggestions.
Issue #4: No notion of embeddable XML
It would be useful to embed our own XML data islands into a document. This is semi related to Issue #3. There are times when a developer needs to store their own state information in a document and the current trend (or desire) is to do that as XML. If you programmatically insert XML into Word a few things happen. One it may show up as arbitrary XML in the document visible to the user and this would defeat the objective of storing state information as XML. Another approach is to insert the XML outside of the boundary of the viewable area of the document in the WordML of a saved document. However, testing has shown that when the document is opened and resaved the embedded XML disappears.
The only solution I?ve come up with so far is outlined in these posts: