Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
Active Channel and Smart Offline Favorites technologies. Introduced in March 1997, the format is designed to "offer frequently updated collections of information, or channels, from any web server for automatic delivery to compatible receiver programs." CDF is somewhat similar to the RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
file format introduced by Netscape in 1999. CDF and Active Channel were introduced with the launch of Internet Explorer 4.0
Internet Explorer 4
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 is a graphical web browser released in September 1997 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for Apple Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX and marketed as "The Web the Way You Want It".It was one of the main participants of the first...
in 1998, while Smart Offline Favorites was introduced with the launch of Internet Explorer 5.0.
Active Channel allows websites to be listed and syndicated
Web syndication
Web syndication is a form of syndication in which website material is made available to multiple other sites. Most commonly, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary or update of the website's recently added content...
with the end-users' desktop. Smart Offline Favorites, like channels, enable users to view webpages from the cache.
However, unlike RSS, the idea of Active Channels was never widely adopted and its use remains very limited. As a direct result, Microsoft has removed CDF support from Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 7
Windows Internet Explorer 7 is a web browser released by Microsoft in October 2006. Internet Explorer 7 is part of a long line of versions of Internet Explorer and was the first major update to the browser in more than 5 years...
.
Example
A generic CDF file:
BASE="http://domain/folder/"
LASTMOD="1998-11-05T22:12"
PRECACHE="YES"
LEVEL="0"> Title of your Channel Synopsis of your channel's contents.
LASTMOD="1998-11-05T22:12"
PRECACHE="YES"
LEVEL="1"> Page Two's Title Synopsis of Page Two's contents.
