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Open Document Format Approved
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."
I doubt M$ will ever support this format, or else their main revenue stream would be endangered.
Any word from the other OpenSource/Free Software office suites if they're planning on supporting (if not totally moving) to the new formats?
What are the criteria for approving standards by the OASIS group? Is there any guarantee on the quality of the standard itself?
Is the any indication if their proposed format is entirely free of patent issues? Given the office format patents that MS has applied for recently, that could be an issue.
see a Text Widget
It's all very well having an open document system, but let's look at this in detail:
For this system to work, every office app needs to adopt this file format. That way, companies can theoretically switch between vendors. Why would Microsoft, who already have the lion's share of the office market include this format? That would surely be shooting themselves in the feet.
If there were, say, three competing office suites each with 33% of the market share, then you could understand them wanting to include support for this format - companies would demand that the app supported them or switch to an alternative. However, when one office suite controls anything in the region of up to 96% of the market share, it'll take a lot more than a common open file format to persuade the average business to move away from a program that is pretty much the standard, whether we like it or not.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
Which they, most obviously, won't.
However, I applaud this group for at least trying. However the realistic cynic in me says that we're not going to see many gains. Hell, the average user in a company doesn't know of and has never been exposed to anything else but Word, Powerpoint and Excel.
If that's the sort of minimal marketshare the competition occupies, it's going to be a tough battle.
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They can just keep .doc as the default option for saving files. Most users never change the defaults, that's why I still get forwarded messages as attatchmets from outlook users.
Office suites aren't the only players in this market.
Since this format is Open, there are no limitations to integrating it into other products such as CMS system, reports (which is more common than you'd expect) and all sorts of other tools which a business uses.
If this integration reaches a certain critical mass where it becomes too much of an advantage for businesses to ignore, MS will have no choice but to adopt it.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
CONSUMER: We demand this new open file format - it allows us more choice and prevents us from being locked down to one Word Processor exclusively.
OPENOFFICE: Okay, we've included it. Now you can read and write to this new open format!
MICROSOFT: We've just added support for the new format too. You can read all open format Word Processor documents in Word. We didn't include a function to write to an open document - our users don't want that kind of complication.
OPENOFFICE: Let's sit back and wait for this open file format to kick start the OpenOffice adoption!
CONSUMER: Microsoft just offered us Office free for 5 years when they found out we were considering an open source alternative to our operating system. Word can even read all these open format files we have created in OpenOffice - let the migration begin!
OPENOFFICE: Oh dear.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
Everybody (/. readers not included) uses MS Office. Why? Because it is a 'standard'. OK, its a lousy standard. In fact, its more of a moving target than a standard, but the trick is that nobody knows this.
Sure they know that sometimes when they put their file on a floppy disk and put that in the post to send to their collegue half way across the office that sometimes it looks a bit different to how it looked on their computer, but then thats how computers are!?!
People don't know what word processor is unless its Word. They are taught it in school. They are taught in college and they are taught it in night classes. Its what employers want to see on CVs. People freek when they see PDFs. People freak when they see RTFs! Why? Because on windows they don't have a blue 'W' on them that lets them know its a word processing docuement.
The .doc is here for the long haul. It has survived every attempt by microsoft to improve it. It has survived some glaring security holes and it will continue to do this because consumers are not offered an alternative that they understand and that remains word compatible.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
It won't do any good at all. It will be like esperanto; what's the point of creating an open document format if you won't be able to communicate with anyone with it? Because unfortunately, if you can't communicate with the stock install of Microsoft Word, you basically can't communicate with anyone.
.docs for the same reason we use .doc to transfer files now: For the benefit of people too lazy or dumb to open files in anything but Microsoft Word.
.doc?" And these were mostly tech jobs I was applying for. It was kind of scary. Now I have a copy of Microsoft Word which I own seemingly solely so that I can create my resume in it, and my resume is sent out as .doc, always.
Okay, yeah, I'm sure there's probably some tiny niche somewhere this fills. But the rest of us are going to have to ignore this new thingy and just continue shipping around
There was a period some years ago, when I first started looking for work, that I didn't have a copy of Microsoft Word, so I would send out my resume as an HTML file, or a PDF, or if it seemed appropriate both. Over this period, most of the time when I sent my resume out, the response-- even when the sent file was just an HTML file, that you double click and it opens in MSIE-- was "I can't figure out how to open your resume, do you have a
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This of course depends on whether the standard gains some credibility. Perhaps IBM could have a stab at Microsoft by declaring their wholehearded support for the standard.
That might be related to many people seeing the PDF-Browser-Plugin as an annoyance instead of a feature.
Linux is not Windows
Yes, they will Embrace And Extend(tm) it.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
MS's 'Software Assurance' bulk licensing scheme is set up in such a way that you end up effectively having to re-buy all your MS-software every few years anyway. So, long-term, you have a choice of paying a fortune to Microsoft at regular intervals just to maintain your current level of licensing, or pay a smaller fortune once only in order to migrate away. The more open formats like this exist, the less painful and hence more attractive moving away becomes. Roll on the day of the tipping point!
I suspect that one of the (admittedly several) reasons that Word managed to knock out Wordperfect so many years ago was that Wordperfect didn't make a huge effort to be compatible with the competition. WordPerfect Corporation took its users for granted, and it was very slow off the blocks in a lot of ways.
Microsoft went to a lot of effort to make Word as compatible as possible with Wordperfect files, just as OpenOffice and several others are doing now, but Wordperfect Corporation didn't go to as much effort in returning the favour for Microsoft Word. My understanding is that it was more like 95% compatibility for a long time. The end result was that Word could cleanly deal with two formats, but Wordperfect could only reliably deal with its own.
The consequence? Once Word documents had reached a critical mass due to certain "other" reasons, people tended to go for the application that would allow them to easily deal with both types of documents rather than only Wordperfect files. This, of course, turned out to be Microsoft Word, and adoption of it was accelerated.
OpenDocument may not be quite the same situation, because with the OpenDocument format being... well... open, it wouldn't necessarily be too difficult for Microsoft to add support if everyone suddenly decided that they wanted it. This would be a victory in itself for other office applications, though, because it would immediately give Word-using businesses and governments the opportunity of distributing files that more people than just Word users can reliably access.
If there's a critical mass of non-Word users (which could even be a combination of Openoffice, Koffice, and whatever else), it's enough reason for many organisations to seriously consider what their standard document formats should be.
Why would you want to tags to html for printing purposes? I believe CSS2 or 3 will be able to do this. And then there is a much better solution: xml + xslt. You take one document with the data (xml) and use the xslt to convert it to any format you want: pdf (xsl-fo), wordml, html, odf, rtf, etc. What you suggest is something you don't want to happen.
hmm... what do we have here? An official Office file format specificiation. Interesting... this is far better than Microsoft Office
I'll just go ahead and quietly print this off and send it on over to the patent office.
*later*
You're Honor... I have indisputable evidence that the OSS community is in direct voilation of MY copywrite and I demand no less than a billion dollars.
*later - Bill swimming in his money*
Another day... another OSS project patanted and sued.
They know that obscurity is only a temporary measure. Look at how good OO is at opening doc files -- not perfect, but good enough for most files and most people.
You can get a sense for what would be a reasonable strategy by considering this: there already is a widely implemented, open file format for word processing: RTF. But it doesn't support stylesheets, among other things.
So, the way to make sure an open format doesn't catch on is to put a bunch of features in your word procesor, which have to be supported by the file format, that aren't in the open specification. Saving and reloading that format is going to feel a bit unnatural, since information natural to the operation of Word will be missing. The file format will be perceived as crippled.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
GIF is on it's way out? So which widely supported format provides animantions, again?
BTW, did you check the image format of the Slashdot images? The Google logo? The ebay logo/icons? The Yahoo logo/icons? For a format on the way out, GIF is still used a lot.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Over and over again I see the same arguments - "OO.o would be great if it did a perfect job of importing/ exporting Word documents"; "Linux would be great if it supported al the printers at Walmart and ran all my Windows software and had loads of games" and every single time I roll my eyes at the...I don't now...arrogance? of people who propound these views as if the Linux/ FOSS community were so stupid and blind that these issues never occurred to them. Honestly, if I see one more whiner ascend to the pulpit and screech at the FOSS community about how the salvation of Linux rests upon [insert blindingly obvious statement here], apparently expecting them to say..."Well, gee, that guy's absolutely right! How did we not think of this before! All hail our new glorious leader!" I'll scream :)
Anyway, rant over - sorry about that, it wasn't aimed at you personally, my friend :)
Anyway, to address your statements more civilly: I'm sure the OO.o developers are acutely aware that they need to import/ export to MS's formats in order to be successful (I'm guessing that they are harangued about it by users every minute of the day, probably with e-mails like "Why do you expect people to use your crappy software when it cannot even open my Word documents. You're hopeless!"). The problem is that it is hard as fuck to interoperate with them as they are closed, messy formats that must be reverse-engineered - a very tricky, time-consuming task. While I'm at it - the Linux community would love to support all the hardware under the sun, expect that hardware manufacturers simply will not provide drivers nor the specs necessary for the community to write their own; Linux won't run all Windows software perfectly as the apps are not written to be portable in the first place so they are forced to re-implement Microsoft's API based on scant documentation (a Herculean effort); and games won't run because games writers use the proprietary DirectX instead of OpenGL and have no interest in aiding porting to Linux.
Phew - that felt good :) For a little more on my opinion on why .doc needs to die and be replaced with a decent format, see here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=148300&cid=124 30161
Oh, and the whole "Embrace and Extend" is a dirty, underhanded scheme designed to stifle competition, and I hope than the OO.o developers never engage in it.
... eventualy, but is it good? Have you seen how well MS has adopted the W3 open standards for css and (x)html? If saving your document in this open format results in strange things, people will blame the format and not MS.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
MSFT SOP: "embrace, extend, extinguish||patent".
Old saying: "Keep you're friends close, and you're enemies closer". (Sorry, origin unknown.) The best way MSFT has to "poison the well" of any new document standard that might encroach upon their monopolistic business plan is from the inside. How better to nudge the standards one way or another in a manner that guarantees ither non-adoption or adopting "the MSFT way"? (Remember how MSFT dealt with OpenGL, Java, and Kerberos?)
MSFT has "embraced" XML as a standard, and then wrapped it in an encrypted binary encapsulation.
The "extended" standard is then protected by DMCA and IP, with "open" licensing encumbered with NDA and SDK/source distribution limitations. "Their" XML format may be "opened" by other programs, but not "saved" by those other programs. This helps to preserve their monopoly status, as well as providing any/all proof needed (by the EU) that MSFT will not play fair, and must be punished.
Good point, but considering the nightmares of OS9, and the flexibility people want with changing icons, it's nice to be somewhat certain which application is going to open the file you're clicking on. Plus you can have the same name file with different extensions and the the extension IS the label. Icons at a small size sometimes tell the story, sometimes not. For me, the extension tells the story and I can search by wildcard *.extension
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
IT seems as if a lot of the comments in this thread are of a 'why bother' attitude, thinking that Microsoft will never adopt it. Well, the battle has just begun folks - there are still a LOT of ways this could play out...
1) All of the OTHER office programs now have a common format to use, and third parties have a standard 'input' for other processing - such as automatically making html, pdf, docbook, or some other format. With one well-documented standard, each tool can concentrate on doing one thing well.
2) Microsoft won't budge on this until they feel the heat from their customers - so people who care must start educating people. The more people who start asking for this format, the more pressure Microsoft will feel. The average joe isn't going to be able to put much pressure, but what if a big contract at the Department of Defense included a requirement that said, "All deliverables must be in OpenDocument format."? The companies bidding on that contract sure would care... And SAIC, Lockheed Martin, etc can put a LOT of pressure on Microsoft.
3) If Microsoft expressed any interest, it will initially be as a 'migration path away from all those inferior products', and they will read the format perfectly. They won't allow users to save in that format without the pressure I mention above, and even when they do, it will probably be buggy, and throw up so many 'Warning: You are saving your document in OpenDocument. That may cause you to lose page formatting' messages that users will have no faith in the OpenDocument format.
Don't give up the battle yet - the fun is just beginning!
But unfortunately, this is the killer issue that prevents me from upgrading to Open Office. I suspect it is the same for others.
It's a lot like the Intel 386 instruction set. It has many warts, and in the 80s Intel's competitors invented better ones. But the sticky glue just won't go away. Now, Intel's biggest competitor (AMD) accepts this instruction set, and works with it, and mostly us customers just breathe a sigh of relief.