On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 01:48:18PM -0400, Nathan Eady wrote:

Mike Traum wrote:

...

I think an xml schema should be developed for a bundle of multimedia files. There may be one already, but in my brief search I was not able to come up with anything.

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I would think that an archive

format,

such as PKWare ZIP format, would make more sense than XML for a bundle of files. Even OpenOffice, which uses XML extensively, uses ZIP for packaging up groups of related files together. Seems to work very well. Java and Mozilla also use the ZIP format for similar purposes (jar and xpi, respectively).

Johan Ceuppens created a jar-based format for contining multiple SVG files about a year ago for Inkscape. See inkscape/src/inkjar/ for details. It would be nice to build atop that effort. It did not include a metadata format IIRC but it does handle the storage/compression/CRC parts.

It was originally created to enable packaging of SVG presentations. In fact, inkview includes support for browsing these files (inkview mypackage.jar).

Bryce