Slashdot Mirror
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."
*Acrobat reader required
- posted in hardware?
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?
Only if you chisel it in stone...
Timo's Audio Software http://www.esseraudio.com
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?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.
PDF is an open format. Here's the link, if you'd like to implement a reader: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/ind ex_reference.html
Activists United
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.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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?
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.
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.
CUSTOMER: Our copies of Microsoft Office don't work on any new PCs. Help!
MICROSOFT: Tough. Shell out $500 per PC per month, or lose the ability to read your documents.
CUSTOMER: Somebody help us!!!
OPENOFFICE (silence - died years ago due to lack of interest)
Can someone explain to me what differance this new format has over .doc when OO.org can open .doc files and convert most other formats into .doc files
Thanks
All spelling mistakes are due to solar flares...honest
Yes, they will Embrace And Extend(tm) it.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Most people are approaching this from the wrong PoV.
Once there is a standard in place, then implementation occurs. And it's definitely likely to appear - first in Open Office, then maybe spreading - I can see Linux using it as the default document standard.
Microsoft will eventually have to support it - if it reaches 10% of the market, then you are going to start getting complaints from customers. Even if it only implements a read-only function, that's good enough.
I face a major productivity sapper, when I send off a .sxw to someone who can't open it. I have to open, export to .doc, check that it displays ok, and then resend. If I can happily compose in whatever editor I want, and press send without having to bother about whether a client will be able to read or not - so much the better.
As an aside, the Indian government is slowly adopting Open Office - mainly because these can be easily translated into the local language. Useful, especially in rural areas and the smaller towns. The government itself released a Tamil version of Open Office, Firefox and a bunch of other stuff. Check out their efforts here.
Cheers, R.
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.
Back when I was a developer I wrote all my documentation in TeX. I often get emails requesting a Word version of my documentation. Even though TeX is quite open.
Underholdning.info
There is a mis-perception that it is not an open format by people who only know microsoft office, because the most reliable method of converting MS office documents to .pdf is by printing to acrobat distiller, for which you need to buy about $300 worth of Adobe software.
Open office exports to .pdf from the file menu. This functionality cost $0 to include, because the format is open. If Microsoft had a business model that involved providing useful tools to their customers they could have included the same functionality, with the same $0 in licensing costs to them.
However since it is more important to them that they have as large a proportion of the world as possible locked into their own proprietary formats, so you find that despite charging you $600-$900 dollars simple, cheap, useful functionality is not included.
And the consequence? People think that .pdf is a proprietary format! You should realize by now that Microsoft's (illegal) business model is doing a great disservice to their customers and the world.
They are not selling a product that is good for their customers. They are selling a product that instead ensures that they will not have to sell a product that is good for their customers in the future.
Still want to buy their stuff?
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.
i thought the MS "xml" document format was something along the lines of
e sfjdlkfuc436^%$& %$5</uue-doc>
<xml>
<msWord>
<author>Bill Gates</author>
<uue-doc>dfndslfuhrdsifdshfkldsfu
</msWord>
</xml>
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
And you know how that happens?
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.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
At least here in the EU, governments are finally starting realize that it's bad when all their data is locked up in a proprietary format. So you see it more and more that supporting Open Standards is is a requirement when they are evaluating software.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Completely off topic: A reasonable suspicion, but that's not what happened:
WordPerfect prided itself on converting everything, even arcane formats (for example, on WP 2000, I can save in MultiMate and Navy DIF Standard formats, whatever that is). I recall no unusual problems with Word (no conversion is perfect).
Nor was WordPerfect technically inferior. In one PC Magazine review at the time, even 16 bit WordPerfect beat 32 bit Word.
Word's advantages were,
1) They came out with a 16 bit Windows 3.1 version first.
2) They came out with a 32 bit Windows version way ahead of the competition. There were complaints that they took advantage of inside info on Win95.
3) Word was bundled with Excel -- that was the beginning of 'office suites'.
4) Microsoft, already holding the Windows monopoly, licensed Office to PC manufacturers in the following way: The manufacturer buys one Office license fee for every machine they sell, whether or not the customer buys Office. Guess what came with every new PC?
The gov't eventually made MS change the last strategy on anti-trust grounds.
... 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
Accordingly, Adobe gives anyone copyright permission, subject to
the conditions stated below, to:
Prepare files whose content conforms to the Portable Document Format
Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the Portable
Document Format
Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document Format
and displays, prints, or otherwise interprets the contents
Copy Adobe's copyrighted list of data structures and operators, as well as the
example code and PostScript language function definitions in the written
specification, to the extent necessary to use the Portable Document Format for
the purposes above
If it's still unclear, I don't know what else to say.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I had never even heard of Oasis before this article. So I figured that this must be an impressive group of people, if they're designing standards, and at least the Slashdot editors think that those standards will make some ripples. Instead, the membership of this standards group consists of:
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.
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.
God knows why, but they are listed.
Microsoft is NOT a supporter of the OpenDocument format and it is very hard to believe they could sponsor its development. Only IBM and Sun are listed as "Sponsor-level members" on the OpenDocument TC Page so you would better check your sources before posting.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
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.
... but you can't make him use Ogg.
"Approved" != "Adopted", and best of luck with that.
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.