Walter Underwood wrote:
> 1. People have been working on compound documents without much
> success for at least fifteen years. To me, that indicates that
> they are either very hard or not very useful.
It's been much longer than 15 years. I was deep in discussions of
compound documents at Digital back in 1981 when we were just getting the
Office Automation products started (mine was ALL-IN-1). That was almost 24
years ago... If I remember right, Digital publicly published "CDA" (The
Compound Document Architecture) in '85 or '86 -- still more than 15 years
ago. Also, there was much debate about compound documents in the X.400 email
discussions in the 80's (it was such a natural thing to do with ASN.1.
Digital's CDA was defined in ASN.1). The issues hadn't been resolved at all
by the time I got to Microsoft in 1991 and found the same discussions raging
there -- OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) was just getting going. We then
went through it all again in the various HTML debates... etc. Some issues
just don't go away.
Compound documents are very useful and very hard.
bob wyman
