RFP: CompoundStorage document

["Dom Lachowicz" <cinamod hotmail com>]

KDE has something like this, and I'd think that it would be a good idea for 
us to have something like it too. Feel free to disagree with me (or make my 
argument better, for that matter).

What I'd like to see is an abstract baseclass/interface which sensibly 
represents a compound document. Some requirements would be:

1) Easy mime-type identification (possibly achieved through points 2,3)
2) Creation of heirarchical structure (subfolders inside of the document)
3) Creation of streams within the root folder (/) and subfolders
4) "Normal" file operations, such as reading, writing, seeking, ...

This storage interface could be then implemented by things such as:

* Zip/JAR (ala OpenOffice)
* OLE2
* TGZ (ala KOffice)

I think that having a nice base interface which can be implemented by 
subclasses would be a great leap for us, especially as we try to achieve 
greater compatibility with existing products on the market, such as MSFT and 
OpenOffice.

Just a throught up for grabs - I'd be interested in working on something 
like this. As a side bonus, other non-office applications could potentially 
benefit from this too.

Dom
/glad to see some traffic on this list again

--
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Sex is not the answer.  Sex is the question.  "Yes" is the answer.

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