n. Acronym for Resource Interchange File Format. Developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, RIFF is a broad-based specification designed to be used in defining standard formats for different types of multimedia files. A tagged-file specification, RIFF relies on headers that “tag” individual data elements in a file, identifying them by type and length. Because tags identify data elements, the RIFF specification can be extended to cover new types of elements while continuing to support older applications, which can simply ignore new, unrecognized elements they encounter in a file. See also AVI, MCI.
File Extension Dictionary
Raster Image File Format Recource Interchange File Format Bitmap Image Audio File