
The format quickly changed from a simple one using tags to a very complex object oriented persistence layer called Bento.
Video file format was developed by apple computer for both windows and mac operating systems software#
A component document system would only work with a known document format that all the components could use, and so soon the standardized document format was pulled into the component software effort. Initial work was published on the WWDC CDs, as well as a number of follow-up versions on later developer CDs. Apple became interested in this work, and soon dedicated some engineers to the task of building, or at least documenting, such a system. Microsoft and Apple, who were very competitive at the time, were unable to agree on common goals and did not work together.Īt about the same time, a group of third-party developers had met at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC '91) and tried to establish a standardized document format, based conceptually on the Electronic Arts Interchange File Format (IFF).

Apple reviewed the Microsoft prototype and document and returned a list of problems they saw with the design. Apple had been experimenting with software components internally for some time, based on the initial work done on its Publish and Subscribe linking model and the AppleScript scripting language, which in turn was based on the HyperCard programming environment. OpenDoc was initially created by Apple in 1992, after Microsoft approached Apple asking for input on a proposed OLE II project. Īt its inception, it was envisioned that OpenDoc would allow, for example, smaller, third-party developers to enter the then-competitive office suite software market, able to build one good editor instead of having to provide a complete suite. Since there is no main application and the only visible interface is the document itself, the system is known as document-centered. In this way users can "build up" their documents from parts. These documents can then be opened on other machines, where the OpenDoc frameworks substitute suitable components for each part, even if they are from different vendors. OpenDoc provides a framework in which these components can run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component.

The core idea of OpenDoc is to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing, or browsing an FTP server. Active development was discontinued in March 1997.

As part of the AIM alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola, OpenDoc is one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies-effectively starting an industry consortium. OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).
