Monday, November 5, 2007

More Compound-Document Formats

The set of compound-document file formats seems to be expanding. At one time, the debate was primarily between Apple's Bento and Microsoft's offerings. Then came a set of formats using XML like OOXML:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML


and ODF:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument


As if two XML compound-document formats weren't enough, there is now a move to promote a new compound-document format called CDF that is being promoted by the W3C:

http://www.w3.org/2004/CDF/


And then there's Verdantium, which saves compound documents in a XML format that is closely aligned with Java's XML object serialization. It's going to be interesting to see what happens.

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