What does DIF stand for?

These elements, many of them optional, were grouped into five types: * Type 1: identifying information about the Document Interchange Format itself * Type 2: naming and time information for the Transfer Mechanism * Type 3: other information about the particular Electronic Document Delivery Transaction * Type 4: information specific to the document, including a brief bibliographic description * Type 5: padding to allow for subsequent changes to the header without changing the header length (optional) Of the five types identified above, only the last is clearly no longer required by EDEN.

Commander Robert Gray, director of the DONOACS Project, says the concept is easy to grasp if one thinks of, say, Xerox, DEC and Datapoint as three different nationalities, and the Navy's new Document Interchange Format (DIF) as the machine equivalent of the Latin language.