svn or mercurial version control of word documents

Question

As far as I know, Microsoft went to some sort of xml-based representation in their most recent version of office. If that's really true, then I would assume that version control would work, although you would obviously have to resolve any embedded changes with the old

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marks in them before loading word.

This other question mentions the issue, but it seems to be taken as a foregone conclusion that version control simply won't work in Word, and I want to know why?

Is version control (ie. Subversion) applicable in document tracking?

Answer 1

There's the zipdoc extension for Mercurial, which seems to handle compressed files like XML-based Word documents by storing them uncompressed internally in order to get meaningful deltas and in order to merge them in a meaningful way. I did not test it, but it sounds like the thing you're looking for.