UCF/MARS

From zedwiki

Discussion

The Adobe proposal for the Universal Container Format is a derivative of the OCF/OEBPS specification that they are attempting to generalize beyond e-books. The only public specification for it so far is in an appendix to the Mars draft specification for PDF in XML (see link below), where they state that most of the wording was taken from OCF.

For our purposes, the important points are where UCF differs from OCF (see Appendix E.7 Comparison of UCF and OCF):

• It does not require the META-INF/container.xml file, arguing that a particular use of a UCF package will often know what the root file of the package is, and thus would not need the extra bootstrapping step of reading the container.xml.
• It does not require that the mimetype of the container be "application/epub+zip", arguing that other media types might be appropriate for other uses of the container.
• It allows you to specify file relationships so that you can associate metadata files explicitly with their container files.
• It allows the META-INF/metadata.xml file to be encrypted as an option for the container creator.
• It removes support for encryption and digital signature specification, leaving it for a later revision of the UCF specification. However, they state that it is likely they will simply take the OCF stance on these features.

Other Characteristics

• RELAX NG Schema

References

• Specification - [1] (Appendix E)