[Gllug] Best format, for everyone, for saving documents.

[Tethys]

Matthew King writes:

> > Sadly, they've standardised on XML to ensure maximal bloat, but at
>
> *cough*gzip -c*cough*
>
> Or to put it in more detail, XML is a text format and as such is
> easily and well compressed.

I've long argued that this is a bad file format, and not in the Unix
tradition. Compare:

	isengard:~% file foo.png foo.gnumeric
	foo.png:      PNG image data, 400 x 712, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced
	foo.gnumeric: gzip compressed data, deflated, last modified: Thu Jan  1 01:00:00 1970, os: Unix

This PNG file format exposes useful metadata about the contents of the
file. All the compressed XML can tell you is that it's compressed. A much
better idea would be to use a chunked file format, with a header chunk
containing details about the type of file, and then a data chunk, which
could contain compressed XML.

Tet

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