A Characterization of Compound Documents on the Web
Eyal de Lara, Dan S. Wallach, Willy Zwaenepoel · 1999
Recent developments in office productivity suites make it easier for users to publish rich compound documents on the Web. Compound documents appear as a single unit of information but may contain data generated by different applications, such as text, images, and spreadsheets. Given the popularity enjoyed by these office suites and the pervasiveness of the Web as a publication medium, we expect that in the near future these compound documents will become an increasing proportion of the Web's content. As a result, the content handled by servers, proxies, and browsers may change considerably from what is currently observed. Furthermore, these compound documents are currently treated as opaque byte streams, but future Web infrastructure may wish to understand their internal structure to provide higher-quality service.