Scott wrote:
>It just struck me... WHY do we even include the images *inside* de
>document?
>Why are they not external objects?
>
>It seems odd to me that they are inside the document.
>
>Word does put them *inside* the file, but that is not a wise decision
>(although at first it may seem).
See my previous posts on structured/embedded storage that people failed to
respond to. How Word handles things is actually ok.
Word uses OLE2. OLE2 is an embedded FS (a FS inside of a file actually). It
has separate streams which are comparable to UNIX directories. So there is a
"WordDocument" stream which contains the markup (equivalent to our ABW
modulo the <d> tag basically). It also has an object-storage stream, where
embedded images, excel spreadsheets, etc... get stored. Word has a very
generic activation mechanism that lets them turn these "files" into
components.
I've talked with Michael Meeks (Bonobo author and LibOLE2 co-author), Daniel
Velliard (LibXML author), and some other people here. [what follows is a
summary of their opinions, which aren't necessarily shared by me] What we're
doing is considered horrible by them, completely ugly, and probably won't
work in more complex settings, should be ever choose to add extensibility,
for example.
Hugs,
Dom
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