Well, *I* thought it was cool
Modern Word files are XML files, zipped. (XML is a sort of cousin to HTML, the markup language webpages are written in). That’s why the extension is docx. If you rename a .docx file to .zip, you can actually open it and see how it’s structured.
That’s what you see in the picture above.
The _rels folder contains relationship files (with the .rels extension). These XML files act like a “map” or “glue” telling Microsoft Word (or any compatible program) how all the different parts of the document are connected to each other.
CustomXML is self explanatory, and the docProps folder (short for “document properties”) contains the metadata about the file itself — not the actual content of the document, but information about the document: it’s the place where Word (and other Office apps) stores things you usually see when you go to File > Info such as the author name, title, creation date, etc.
The actual documents lives in the Word folder and the [Content_Types].xml file’s job is to tell any program what kind of content each file inside the ZIP package is. Sort of a “file type registry”.
And yes, they’re human-readable and you can edit them manually, with a fair probability of screwup if you get it wrong. Why you would want to I do not know; I just like to take things apart to see how they’re made. Yes, some of these words were cut and pasted from the robot.
I hope you had an awesome Good Friday. I’ll see you on the other side of the weekend!
April 3, 2026 — 5:59 pm
Comments: 4