A Novel XML-Based Document Format with Printing Quality for Web Publishing

Although many XML-based document formats are available for printing or publishing on the Internet, none of them is well designed to support both high quality printing and web publishing. To address this problem, we propose a novel XML-based document format for web publishing, called CEBX, in this paper. The proposed format is a fixed-layout document with printing quality, which has optimized document content organization, physical structure and protection scheme to support web publishing. There are four noteworthy features of CEBX documents: (1) CEBX provides original fixed layout by graphic units for high quality rendering. (2) The content in CEBX document can be reflowed to fit the display device basing on the content blocks and additional fluid information. (3) XML Document Archiving model (XDA), the packaging model used in CEBX, supports document linearization and incremental edit well. (4) By introducing a segment-based content protection scheme into CEBX, some part of a document can be previewed directly while the remaining part is protected effectively such that readers only need to purchase partial content of a book that they are interested in. This will be very helpful to document distribution and support flexible business models such as try-before-buy, on-demand reading, superdistribution, etc.