Computer File Formats

HC Deb 25 May 2004 vol 421 c1524W

Mr. Allan

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport 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. [173364]

Mr. McNulty

The DfT website (http://www.dft.gov.uk) provides access to publicly available documents in a range of formats. The majority of content is made available in Hypertext Mark Up Language (HTML), Portable Document Format (PDF) and Microsoft WORD. All images contained within documents are made available in Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) or Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) formats depending on the complexity of the image. Statistical data tables are provided in Excel, Comma separated values (CSV) and PDF format.

The same formats apply for documents held in archive areas of the website.