[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Friday, October 8, 2021 at 4:37:06 AM UTC+13, osuv... at gmail.com wrote:
> Whatever happened to Compound Document Architecture (CDA)? It always
> struck me as an effort (now abandoned) toward an object oriented file structure.

Then there was Bento, which Apple was fond of for a while (back in the days of the OpenDoc-versus-OLE2 war).

Seems like nobody cares about live embedding and compound documents now. Probably turned out to be too complex for most users to handle.

One interesting modern trend is the use of ZIP archives as a document metaformat. For example, an ODF file (ISO 26300) is essentially a ZIP archive. There is this interesting convention that the first element of the archive shall be named “mimetype”, and its content shall be uncompressed. This allows file sniffers to pick up the MIME type info at a fixed offset near the start of the file.