CDF: The Common Format You've Never Heard Of

XHTML, CSS 2.1, XMLHttpRequest, AJAX, XForms, SVG, XSLT, XPath, XSL-FO:
The Compound Document Format was set up as a way of tying together at
a minimum all of those technologies described above into a single
cohesive whole. Put another way, it's a fancy way of describing the
core suite of W3C document standards into a cohesive whole, although
it does place some fairly minor requirements on usage in order to provide
a consistent standard. CDF was in the news recently with the implosion
of the Open Document Foundation, originally established to endorse ODF,
though in its death throes it briefly highlighted the CDF format as
perhaps a better format for documents than either OOXML or ODF. The
effort of the CDF working group has been to essentially standardize
on the way that web documents can be bound together into what appears
to be a cohesive whole. Part of this is accomplished through the use
of a standard called the Web Integration Compound Document (or WICD).
Already, much of CDR has been implemented in the more sophisticatedly
forward browsers. Opera 9.5 has a rather extensive support for most of
CDF core and Firefox 3.0 is moving in that direction, though the
biggest area of weakness is in SVG animation support. JustSystems, a
company that has a huge presence in Japan [is] beginning to make an
impact outside of that country, has been working towards a CDF platform
for a number of years, and has one of the more expressive (and impressive)
displays of how compound documents COULD work... Both Sony and Nokia
have WICD implementations working (as prototypes) on certain of their
mobile phone chipsets, with similar announcements from Abbra Vidualize
and BitFlash, both makers of mobile graphical chipsets, while Sun is
partnering with OpenWave to create a formal WICD implementation in
line with "JSR 290: Java Language and XML User Interface Markup
Integration." More Information