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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."
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?It's amazing to see so many people already giving up before the fight has even started.
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.
Now will it be pushed though ISO (prefereably/ SmartEC
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 ?
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.
I don't know how good Word was in reading WordPerfect files, but if you read Slashdot and other sites, you'll see that in almost every single MS Office or OpenOffice stories, people are always complaining that OpenOffice can't read Word documents correctly. On top of that, add VB macros, OLE and that kind of things.
I suspect that it was relatively easy to read/write WP documents, but it's much harder to read/write Word documents.
Nowadays I just store information in Wiki's. A directory tree with documents is an outdated structure for storing (shared) knowledge. Because of Wiki's associative nature you can create multiple views of your information, and you can collaborate to very high degree.
BTW: The only formatting that is really relevant are headers, bullets, and simple tables.
Unless you know what's going on in serious documentation, you don't understand what this is about. Serious documentation (books, manuals, etc.) has been moving away from Microsoft Word for a decade now, but it has had a lot of bumps along the way. Any reasonable-sized company with a documentation library is going to be using something like FrameMaker, Xmetal, RoboHelp, AuthorIt or any other number of real publishing packages.
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.