What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?
That would be coming full circle, and going back to the bad old days of binary .doc and .xls files, which used an efficient data store for fast incremental updates:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;19&#x2F;why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;19&#x2F;why-are-the-micros...</a><p>OpenDocument and its competitor (OOXML) both use zip&#x2F;XML for portability reasons. Yes, they&#x27;re less efficient. But they&#x27;re also completely independent of any specific software implementation [1].<p>[1] Mostly - OOXML has some parts that depend on MS Office&#x27;s implementation. But ODF is completely described by the spec.