Jalview Project Archives
These are Zip archives of an XML file containing alignments, trees, Principal Component Analyses (since 2.11.0), 3D structures, and display information for Jalview, VARNA, Jmol and UCSF Chimera. XML documents conform to a schema, and changes to the format are made to ensure future versions of Jalview will be able to read old Jalview project files.
For those who want to know...
Jalview 2.11.0
onwards employ the JAX-B java to XML binding framework to read and
write Jalview project files. Earlier versions of Jalview employed Castor. Jalview 2.08 used
descriptor classes which significantly increase the speed of
marshalling / unmarshalling java objects into XML.
Files created prior to Jalview 2.08 can no longer be read by Jalview
2.11.0. If you need to import old project files, then please import
them to Jalview 2.10.5 (available from the Jalview version archive)
and save the project again to convert it to the new format.