>>I'm working with the Office Tools group on some things with the new XML editor that will help in developing WordML (new XML schema type for Word 2003 documents). It is very cool that Word can now save and open XML files directly, no import/export or .DOC binary files needed which eliminates the need for OLE automation or even from having to have Word to create a Word document.
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>Cool, but this would only be practical for short documents, correct? Intuitively, long documents or possibly even short ones with lots of formatting, etc. would explode file sizes, right?
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>When is Word2003 scheduled for release?

Actually, since the new XML Editor is fully built in managed code (using the CLR and .NET Framework with System.Xml), it is super fast even on large documents. We have found that 3rd party XML editors written in Java are too slow for large documents, usually 1meg or larger. We don't have final performance testing complete, but so far it is looking great for large XML documents. The launch for Office 2003 is later in October, and you can find information on it at http://www.microsoft.com/office/, and more info on Word 2003 at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/editions/word.asp.