Open Document Format Approved 399
An anonymous reader writes "The OASIS Group announces that the third Committee Draft [PDF] of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification has been approved
as an OASIS Standard. The submission of the approved standard can be found at here.
The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business or changes their software or licensing terms to something less favorable."
The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business or changes their software or licensing terms to something less favorable."
Microsfot a sponsor (Score:1, Interesting)
What about Bill (Score:5, Interesting)
The question still remains:
- Will Open Office, AbiWord, et al adopt this?
- Will Microsoft adopt this?
- Will adoption mean Default, Available Option, or partial support (import only)
It's a step in the right direction, no doubt, but how will this be addressed in practice?Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, everyone is aware of the stranglehold MS has on the market, but this new standard is exactly meant to fight this stranglehold. And I don't agree that MS has to come on board to make this a success.
1. This gives all alternatives to MS Office an advantage over MS Office, which is of course a good thing.
2. Now that it is a standard, what about governments requiring that the software they use be standard compatible?
3. Even if MS themselves don't support it, how about third party verndors, or open source hackers developing a plugin for MS Office to support this format?
To sum it up, I think it is a little more complex than you seem to think and the fight has only just started, so don't give up yet.
Re:What about Bill (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft
Question (Score:2, Interesting)
Thanks
Fasttrack it though ISO now ! (Score:5, Interesting)
though a fasttrack). The ISO stamp carries far
more weight for governements agencies and this
could cange a lot of things. See for example
Tim Bray's log on the subject
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/09/24
Daniel
BTW: wasn't the September 2004 LSB spec supposed to be fasttracked though the ISO process too ?
Recruitment agents and Word documents (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in the process of looking for work now, and I've found that recruitment agents in particular tend to prefer Word documents over something like PDF or HTML.
This isn't because they can't open the latter -- it's because they like to be able to easily edit them. When a recruitment agent hands your resume to a potential employer, they'll usually want to remove identifying information from your resume. This, of course, prevents the employer from approching you directly, in which case the recruitment agent might not get their commission.
Granted that this isn't quite the same as not being able to open a resume at all, but recruitment agents in particular do often have an ulterior motive for wanting a Word document rather than a PDF, for instance.
Open formats is not the holy grail (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yup, and you know what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Probably doomed (Score:2, Interesting)
For their usual meaning of ANSI -- that is, "our own incompatible 'standard' that's inconsistent with even our own software".
Have you messed with console-mode Win32 programming? What the call "ANSI" is bad, bad mojo that bears all marks of intentional sabotage.
Re:Probably doomed (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not just make "newpage" and "pagedimensions" tags for HTML, and include the ability to embed anything that can be rendered (including fonts; everything else can already be embedded in Javascript variables)?
If you put those things in, then (D)HTML becomes a new document format with all the capabilities of all the other formats.
It would even make it easy to make new types: just add DTDs, write new tags and say what they do.
Right now OO has a 600 page document to explain their "open" format. Yeah, that's open. Open like CORBA and like SGML. Open, but a huge chunk of time to learn when there are other perfectly good ways to do it that don't take all of your time.
Oh, and it would kill Acromedia's chokehold on printable document formats.
Re:Microsoft and format compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that it was relatively easy to read/write WP documents, but it's much harder to read/write Word documents.
Now all we need is widespread adoption (Score:3, Interesting)
The US Department of Defense. If there is any "customer" that can tell Microsoft what's what, it's the DoD. (Other branches of the government can too; they have the juice but they don't have the prunes.) Once the DoD even begins to addopt these open formats, it immediately shuts out Microsoft because Office doesn't support them.
Microsoft would have to make a very painful decision at that point.
Because goverments want open standards (Score:2, Interesting)
This means that either Microsoft needs to implement Open Standards, or they aren't even considered anymore. Maybe it's not that black and white as I write here, but at least there is real pressure to implement Open Standards.
Why use documents anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW: The only formatting that is really relevant are headers, bullets, and simple tables.
.doc won't go away (Score:1, Interesting)
Why is this? Because I swap documents with my co-workers, my suppliers, and my customers. If a customer wants a copy of my slides, I HAVE to give him .ppt. There is no way I can start any
sort of discussion with him about doc formats,
it is a distraction to my primary business.
Editable office document formats are not just an organisation-internal thing. That's why they are so sticky.
I am far more afraid of a new document format than of a new word processor. If I try a new word processor and don't like it, I can go back. But if I embrace a new document format, and want to change back in 2 years' time, I'm stuck. FireFox spread quickly because trying it is low-risk. The same is not true of OO.
Why can't OO embrace and extend the .doc format,
rather than inventing something new?
/quickly dons flame-proof underpants
Re:Probably doomed (Score:1, Interesting)
Why not just make "newpage" and "pagedimensions" tags for HTML, and include the ability to embed anything that can be rendered (including fonts; everything else can already be embedded in Javascript variables)?
Egad! Web "designers" thinking they're typesetters and print artists.
If you put those things in, then (D)HTML becomes a new document format with all the capabilities of all the other formats. It would even make it easy to make new types: just add DTDs, write new tags and say what they do.
Just because I put wings and a jet engine in my car doesn't make it an airplane.
Know what's going on in documentation (Score:4, Interesting)
One problem with this is that each software package is good for a particular type of publishing (print, PDF, online help, HTML) and not as good or useless for the others. The other problem is that the collaboration models on most of these programs are weak.
But the really big issue is that the companies making these products tend either to get bought out by the big guys or go belly-up after a few years when the new tool-de-jour hits the shelves. In the last few weeks, two tools (RoboHelp and FrameMaker) announced end-of-life. Now if you are HP and you are using one of these, you are now stuck with thousands of pages of documentation in a semi-proprietary format. This happens to you every few years, and you pop several thousand or several hundred thousand dollars in the conversion each time.
It just so happens that the tool-du-jour right now is something called AuthorIT, which isn't even a cousin of a word processor. It's a database that stores documents, and stores output properties. It actually is the one tool that does a good job of producing print and online documentation (CHM, HTML, XML, whatever) The single-sourcing capablity is why it is the tool-du-jour, and why a lot of the big companies use it. CA alone has a million pages in this format.
But AuthorIt isn't any bigger than those previous tool companies, and their format is just as proprietary, although you can have HTML and XML output, so in theory you are in pretty good shape for converting. Still, these big companies are using it for their big documentation projects.
I don't know what percentage of documentation uses all these other tools, but suffice it to say it's a lot, and it's more critical stuff than most of what is written in Word. These people don't care about the documents written in Word. They are all on the standards body so that they don't have to keep losing all their documentation styles, templates and layouts every time a new kind of online help or new kind of documentation product becomes popular.
Re:Probably doomed (Score:4, Interesting)
None of the things also handle the effects (or javascript that produces that effect, etc.) that I mentioned. I'd be perfectly happy with a oHTML (office XML) xml format that was html+javascript with some new tags.
The point is that this new document format is much, much different from that. There are a lot of things in the format that don't really even need to be there, and are just redundant information adding to the complexity.
If they use something similar to html, then they've got about 100 WYSIWYG editors that can become document editors really quick.
Another irrelevant standard (Score:3, Interesting)
Tom Magliery Blast Radius Inc. Voting Member
Nathaniel Borenstein IBM Voting Member - Probation
Xiaowei Hu IBM Voting Member - Probation
Gary Edwards Individual Voting Member
David Faure Individual Voting Member
Patrick Durusau Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Voting Member
Michael Brauer Sun Microsystems* TC Chair
Lars Oppermann Sun Microsystems* Secretary
Instead, 8 seemingly random, average people are making this "standard". Who are these people? What are their qualifications?
On a similar note, my buddy and I came up with a new standard that should replace EDI for all intra-business communication. We'll have it up just as soon as my Geocities account is activated.
Re:How can it be future compatible? (Score:4, Interesting)
How is this possible? First of all, the file format must be flexible and extensible, not fixed. Also, generally, the various fields are explicitly tagged in some way (as opposed to, say, specifying that fields are in a fixed order, or begin and end at fixed byte offsets). Also, generally, the file format includes a version number in a well-defined spot at the beginning of the file that never changes its representation, so that a version 1 program can at least recognize (if not process) even a version 99 file.
Then, all you have to do is rig things up so that programs ignore information that they don't recognize (i.e. tags that they don't know). You can also get creative whenever you add information to add it in such a way that the results when the new informaation is ignored are reasonable.
Often, you use a major/minor scheme in the file format version number. Typically, changes to the minor version number are backwards and forwards compatible, but when you make a major change to the structure that old programs won't be able to deal with, or add significant new information that they won't be able to safely ignore, you bump the major version number, and then the old programs say, "Sorry, I can't read this file, it requires a newer version of me." (But at least the older program doesn't interpret the newer file as garbage, or crash while trying to read it. That's crass.)
Needless to say, XML (among other metaformats) is amenable to just about everything I've touched on here.
Future compatibility sounds impossible at first, especially if you've been subliminally taught by Microsoft that every upgrade to a file format "obviously" requires an upgrade to all the programs that deal with it. And it's easy to come up with "strawman" arguments why future compatibility is "impossible" -- in some worst-case scenario. But it can be made to work, most of the time, and it gives you a glorious kind of freedom and flexibility that distinguishes excellent from mundane software [eskimo.com].
Re:Microsoft and format compatibility (Score:3, Interesting)
What people complain about is not a statistically accurate representation of the real world, and you aren't even interpreting their complaints correctly.
Yes, OOo does not read some MS Word documents correctly. It's something almost everybody who uses OOo has encountered, and almost everybody would like that to be fixed.
However, that observation doesn't tell you whether that's a significant practical problem. In some environments, it may be an insurmountale problem (for example, if you are an enterprise that has implemented entire work flows as MS Office documents, complete with scripts and server applications). In many others, it may be insignificant. I have had no more problems with OOo and MS Word files than with different versions of MS Word.
If you are a home user or a small business, OOo is likely already a reasonable choice even if you need to deal with other people's Word documents frequently. Microsoft also makes available a Word viewer for free, which means that you really can read everything without ever having to purchase MS Office.