Document standard
Definition
Document standards can be defined in terms of:
- Document file formats, i.e. text or binary formats for storing documents an storage media.
- Content structure, usually an XML application
Document file formats
There are a lot of these, see Wikipedia's document file format article or the full List of file formats
See also: e-book formats
Markup languages that separate content from style
These are somewhat human readable
- DocBook (XML or SGML) was originally intented for authoring technical documents but can be used for almost any kind of document.
- DITA
- XHTML strict
- TEX and related languages like Latex
Messy markup languages
These markup content, style and other things together and are not really human readable.
- OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF): Open Office XML Project
- Microsoft XML Refence Schemas (including WordML, SpreadsheetML, etc.): Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas
- Microsoft RTF, an older standard that is being phased out
- Framemaker *.MIF
Binary file formats
Not human readable
- Microsoft *.doc
- Framemaker *.fm
Specialized markup formats for the Internet
These are usually combined within other formats, e.g. XHTML. Most important formats are:
- Display of mathematical formula: MathML
- Vector Graphics: SVG (or the defunct Microsoft WML format)
- Multimedia sequencing: SMIL
- Linking: XLink (this is not supported in XHTML 2)
- Forms: XForms
- Voice markup: VoiceML
For now, integration of various vocabularies into main-stream web pages is not obvious. Only standards-aware browsers like Firefox can handle for instance XHTML + SVG + MathML. In addition, editing is not always easy since there are no official combined DTD's available, although a general standard for this (Compound Document by Reference Framework 1.0) is almost ready.
Hardware
- Paper
- All sorts of computers with a monitor
- Mobile devices
- Refeshable electronic paper
Links
- Wikipedia's Comparison of document markup languages
- http://www.answers.com/topic/document-file-format
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_formats
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_document_markup_languages
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_office_document_formats_debate
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordprocessingML