>In words, a compound document is a "document of documents", where each
>document conforms to a schema; i.e, a nested document conforms to a schema
>as well as does its parent document. I will use the term composition and
>compound document interchangeably.
This limits the compound document to only being valid xml. In the
real world most word processing compound documents also contain
image files as well as other foreign data format.
So what about giving compound document a wider definition?
a "Compound Document" is a set of Documents and Objects that can refer
and link to each other.
The compound document can then contain any type of data format.
valid xml files, DTDs , Schemes , image files etc.
If you could 'unpack/unzip' a compound document you would produce
a directory and files - just as in a normal file system and
a root document that can define the view of the
document as a Whole - index.xml or/and index.html.
You can then relatively reference Xlink/Xpoint documents as
easy as you would a directory of html files.
So why not just store a compound document in zip achieve file format
but with another affix just like java jar 'files'.
It is easy to 'peer into' and 'grab' the content of a zip file,
java classes and C libraries that can do this already exist.
So why not just add this functionality to all XML applications,
formatter, browsers etc.
UNQUOTE
When the www-xml-packaging group formed in July 2000, after a little prompting ...
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-packaging/2000Jul/0004.html
... a zip/jar type archive solution faced little real competition from similar binary embedded in XML.
In fact, the zipped compound document was the solution adopted for all of OpenOffice.org and Sun's StarOffice document formats.
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