Re: No more W3C plans to address packaging

At 13:11 31/10/2000 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>>>I think much of the community is aware of this development,
>>>but just to close the loop...
>>
>>Is anyone in the community interested in picking up the ball ?
>I certainly would be, but we've got to figure out what exactly packaging is.

I'd be too, and the question(s) you ask is precisely the reason why I
wanted to know if anyone was working on xml packaging.

"Packaging" can mean a lot of things. I haven't yet had time to look into
the other packaging initiaves that were mentionned on this list so I don't
know exactely what angle they approach packaging from.

The angle I'm interested in is geared towards having a bunch of files --
XML or not -- somehow bundled into an XML document (stored within and
encoded or stored outside). In fact some sort of XML file system. Some time
ago I read about Microsoft using a "micro" file system within Office in
order to store multiple documents of any type within one single file. I
think it was called OLE-FS but I'm not sure, and as the saying goes if you
don't like the name Microsoft gave to one of it's products/functions just
wait five minutes (I couldn't find a reference to that on their site).

I'm interested in developing an XML vocabulary that would be able to store
documents either by value (with different encodings that can be specified)
or by reference (probably using something like XInclude) including
directories (so that a file system can be directly mapped into that
vocabulary) and other metadata such as permissions or resource forks, the
metadata being extensible so as to allow any data to be grafted onto the
files. RDF could be a way to encode such information, it tends to scare
people away but it seems appropriate given that what I have in mind is
could be summarized as a grouping of resources (by value or by reference)
together with arbitrary metadata about them.

Such schemes are already used here and there, in XML or not but I have yet
to see one that does all of this and allows for extensibility (I haven't
looked into the OpenOffice initiative yet).


-- robin b.
Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

Received on Thursday, 2 November 2000 13:41:42 UTC