xml-dev - Compound Documents as directories stored in zip files

[David Mohring <heretic@ihug.co.nz>]

As Roger Costello defined compound documents in
http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/9901/0754.html 

>compound-document ::= (compound-document | valid-document)
>valid-document ::= <a document that conforms to a schema>

>In words, a compound document is a "document of documents", where each
>document conforms to a schema; i.e, a nested document conforms to a schema
>as well as does its parent document.  I will use the term composition and
>compound document interchangeably.

This limits the compound document to only being valid xml. In the 
real world most word processing compound documents also contain 
image files as well as other foreign data format.

So what about giving compound document a wider definition?

a "Compound Document" is a set of Documents and Objects that can refer
and link to each other. 

The compound document can then contain any type of data format. 
    valid xml files, DTDs , Schemes , image files etc.

If you could 'unpack/unzip' a compound document you would produce
 a directory and files - just as in a normal file system and 
 a root document that can define the view of the 
 document as a Whole - index.xml or/and index.html.
You can then relatively reference Xlink/Xpoint documents as 
easy as you would a directory of html files.

So why not just store a compound document in zip achieve file format 
but with another affix just like java jar 'files'.

It is easy to 'peer into' and 'grab' the content of a zip file,
java classes and C libraries that can do this already exist.
So why not just add this functionality to all XML applications, 
formatter, browsers etc.

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