WIF is a Quadralay Corporation standard used as an intermediate format. Quadralay chose to establish WIF rather than use another XML format because other XML formats do not provide all the functionality needed to solve conversion-related issues. Other XML standards are great for authoring structured content, but they deliberately exclude formatting information and they are not designed to define source that lacks structure. To address many conversion-related issues, such as unstructured Microsoft Word source documents with one style (Normal) used throughout the documents and customized as needed, Quadralay needed a more flexible and powerful intermediate format.

The most flexible way to resolve these issues was to create WIF, which provides a stable XML schema that can grow and change as needed for future input and output format requirements. WIF is designed to address the following goals: