Subject: OpenOffice (was Re: Structured Storage [was: Re: Inline Images??? ])
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Apr 21 2001 - 21:35:45 CDT
LDR wrote:
> Because it's a "real" archive format, ZIP can indeed be used for
>this purpose PROVIDED that you either ignore or find workarounds for
>some/all of it's limitations. For example, ZIP isn't truely hierarchical
>(hierarchy is faked via path strings, so you need to keep the entire
>catalog in memory and use fancy hashing), ZIP only supports ISO-Latin-1
>filenames, ZIP has extremely limited metadata support, ZIP can't
>address >2Gig files, etc.
>
> The most common solution to these problems is one that I pioneered
>while I was at Adobe is to use a "manifest" file (ala Java's JAR files, but
>in XML) to maintain the full complete metadata catalog of the archive and
>basically ignore ZIP's metadata system and filename limitations. I believe
>that OO is taking a similiar approach, but I haven't actually looked at
>their stuff.
This is exactly what the OO people do right now. I've been in contact with
some of their people. Some of them are truly ambitious about several issues:
1) Interoperability at various levels
2) Structured file formats (they might want to ditch .zip)
3) Possibly rewriting their DTD with our help/input/concerns
4) Code/other sharing (filters, other algorithms)
These are all good things and I'd like to help them out, if for no reason
than that it has the benefit of helping ourselves. I'll let you all know
more as I find out/plan things.
Dom
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