§ Mr. AllanTo ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office what his Department's policy is in respect of the computer file formats used for the(a) distribution and (b) archiving of publicly available documents. [173357]
§ Mr. AlexanderThe Cabinet Office's policy is to meet the Government Web Guidelines. This states that documents be made available on the Internet wherever possible in the following formats:
- Hypertext Markup Language
- Portable Document Format
- Microsoft Word format
- Rich Text Format
- Plain Text Format
- Comma Separated Variable format (for spreadsheets)
- Microsoft Excel format (for spreadsheets)
The archiving of Cabinet Office web information has been addressed by the creation of an "archive section". This is now publicly available at http://archive. cabinetoffice.gov.uk and has been created in compliance with the latest version of the Office of the e-Envoy Guidelines. Again, wherever possible, documents are available in the formats listed above.
This archive is an extension of the National Archive's UK Central Government Web Archive initiative which deals with cross-Government "web harvesting". Further details on this can be found at http://www. pro. gov.uk/webarchive/default. htm