Hi,

the openoffice document types are actually a directory tree of several files
(mostly XML), put in a zip archive, thus saving up to 90% of storage space and
keeping things packed together.

However, this format is extremely unfriendly to revision control systems. If I
want to store a document or a presentation into an revision control system such
as CVS or Subversion, the document is treated as a simple binary. If I have a
document with pictures etc. of 8 MByte, and change just a single character in
the text (typo...), this wastes another 8 MByte of storage. It would be
desirable to have a different file-format, which is not that highly compressed,
but better to handle for revision control.

What about this:

Leave it as it is, but allow to not use the ZIP archive, but store it in a real
directory. Allow to store into directories and to read from it.

regards
Hadmut