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Interactive Whiteboard / Common File Format (IWB/CFF)

The Interactive WhiteBoard/Common File Format (IWB/CFF) specification defines a file format to hold content primarily designed to be viewed on a large display. Much of this content will be designed to be interactive, so objects can move around the page.

The primary goal of this format is to establish a format that can be opened, edited, saved and used across many whiteboard applications so that teaching content can be exchanged between establishments. To this goal the format must be simple but extendible in a restricted way to ensure compatibility.

The initial work on the Common File Format was done in 2009 by Becta in the UK. Changes from the Becta specification include:

  1. Replace the Becta namespace declaration (xmlns:iwb=http://www.becta.org.uk/iwb) with the  IWB namespace (xmlns=/xsd/iwb_v1p0).
  2. Declare the  IWB namespace as the default namespace for the IWB elements and remove the “iwb:” namespace prefix from those IWB elements (<iwb version="1.0" xmlns="/xsd/iwb_v1p0").
  3. Use the schemaLocation attribute to specifically declare all of the namespaces and their document locations in each content.xml XML instance document like this:
    xsi:schemaLocation="/xsd/iwb_v1p0 /profile/iwb/iwbv1p0_v1p0.xsd http://www.w3.org/2000/svg /profile/iwb/svgsubsetv1p0_v1p0.xsd http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink /xsd/w3/1999/xlink.xsd">
     

    Figure 1 - Original CFF FIle

    Figure 1: Example of original CFF file namespace declarations.

     

    Figure2: Converted 1EdTech IWB File

    Figure 2: Example of converted 1EdTech IWB 1.0 file namespace declarations.

 

 Read the Primer on IWB/CFF Conformance

IWB/CFF Specification Final Specification v1.0 - HTML

IWB/CFF Version 1.0 Final Specification

IWB/CFF Version 1.0 Final Conformance Specification

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