Windows 8 In Depth

File Types and File Extensions

One of the fictions that Microsoft has tried to foist on the computer-using public is that we live in a “document-centric” world. That is, that people care only about the documents they create and not about the applications they use to create those documents. This is actually not all that far from the truth if you only use the new Windows 8 interface because Windows 8 apps are designed to hide their interface elements, so you see only the document (whatever it might be) that’s currently onscreen.

However, for the rest of us who spend the majority of our time in the Desktop app, this notion of a document-focused computing world is pure hokum. The reality is that applications are still too difficult to use and the ...