KOffice To Use Open Office File Format

InodoroPereyra writes "This article at The Dot indicates that the KOffice developers decided to switch to the Open Office file format (OASIS) for their next major release. Excellent news both for KOffice, which will benefit from OpenOffice's excellent filters, and for the GNU/Linux Desktop users in general, who will benefit from a unified file format standard between these office suites."

Comments

That other office suite

[__past__]

Let's wait how long it takes that other office suite vendor to see the light. After all, they are an OASIS member themselves...

Electronic Publishing

[SgtChaireBourne]

Yes, let's hope this will be a new trend. The last round of open standards (e.g. TCP/IP, HTTP + HTML) brought a lot of good, especially HTML. I'm curious to see where this step will lead.

I suspect that it is also a big step closer to electronic documents with a long shelf life. This may lead towards electronic publishing where well-formed and, possibly, valid documents become the norm. Even if the structures are rudimentary, this still will help portability and retrieval.

Right now, [X]HTML and PDF are only part way there. PDF is useful for rapid dissemination, but can more or less be thought of as a compact form of paper. Most HTML document are neither well-formed nor valid and often too dependent on transient constellations of technologies. So, a format like this will let organizations choose tools suited for their specific needs and tasks.