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>Do you regard office file formats as binary? To me they are application
>specific file formats.
Absolutely. They are not text files. If it ain't text its binary.
Perhaps you are using a more restrictive definition of binary files,
in which case it would be helpful if you elaborated what you mean so
we can be sure we're talking about the same things.
>Even so, is your comparison of these file formats
>with XML a lossy comparison? That is does the XML version include all the
>application specific information needed to recreate the application file or
>is it limited strictly to the data content?
It includes all the information, no loss, for those cases where I'm
using the application itself to save XML. In comparing OpenOffice XML
formats to Microsoft Office binary formats, there may be some loss
related to moving between the different applications, but that's
essentially a bug in the OpenOffice Word converter, not a problem
with converting binary to XML.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
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