OpenOffice file format
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I thought I'd take a look in my OpenOffice files, having heard that the programs use a XML format for the files. I was met with binary rubbish, but I quickly noticed a familiar beginning: this is a Zip file.
Try unzipping an OpenOffice file and you'll find not just one but actually several XML files. For example, a chapter of my master's thesis includes five XML files: there's content, style, meta, settings and a manifest. Meta, for example, contains Dublin Core metadata and statistics like page, paragraph, word and character counts - useful, perhaps? Content has the contents of the file, neatly placed in >p< tags.
The same format is used for presentations and spreadsheets, even for vector art! Everything is described in detail: which element goes where. If you embed something in your document, there's a new object in the file with the same XML files for it. How clever!
There's a project dedicated to the OpenOffice file format. If you're interested, see OpenOffice.org XML File Format. It's certainly a very elegant and a modern approach to creating a file format.
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