Frank White wrote:
Perhaps someone could lead off with a brief non-technical explanation.

I'm not very good at brief or non-technical, but I'll give it a shot.  Smart
documents have metadata (data that describes data) attached so that the
application (for example, MS Word) understands a little more about what
you're trying to accomplish.

MS gives the example "... rather than knowing that a paragraph is the second
one in the document, it would be much more valuable to know that the
paragraph is the one destined to contain a product description" on this
site: http://tinyurl.com/t1ts

The idea is that the more MS Word can "understand" about what you're doing,
the more it can help by providing specialized tips, templates or interfaces.


I would imagine that a Smart Document could also be quickly searched by it's
metadata.  In the example above, you might be able to search for "product
description" along with the name of product to locate the document.  This is
just speculation on my part, however, given the nature of XML.

Alicia

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