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OpenDocument Alliance to Fight Digital Dark Age
OSS_ilation writes "A consortium of vendors and academic institutions -- including IBM, Sun Microsystems and the American Library Association -- has announced today that they are forming the OpenDocument Alliance as part of an effort to promote open file standards worldwide. The group will support the one truly open standard file format, OpenDocument, which is an XML-based file format used saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Sun's Simon Phipps said he believed ODF would allow future generations to view all of today's digital docs and prevent a digital Dark Age from occurring."
But there are already such formats. I.e. latex. Ufortunatelly the only usable wysiwyg editor s LyX which runs oout of the box only on linux.
Any /.'ers have more info about Microsoft's format?
Get thee to Groklaw, my curious friend. The debate, along with fine technical details are found there.
On the other hand, the consortium (if you will) proposing a universal open document standard sounds more open and the proof will be in the implementation. Still, I'd like to know more specifically what that standard proposal is in detail.
The implementation is here. It's called "ODF," the "Open Document Format." It is the default file format of the Open Office suite of applications; KOffice is also moving (or *has* moved, I'm too lazy to look) to that format, as well. IBM's office suite will implement ODF.
Again, Groklaw has a lot of information, including pointers to the official specification.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
actually I stand corrected. Safari isn't open source but here is a useful link.
http://www.apple.com/opensource/
Actualy, whilst a lot of Apple software is closed source a lot is also Open the Apple OSS site contains some info on this (as well as some pro OS X propogander).
James P. Barrett
There are a few people pointing out other "open" file formats. OpenDocument is part of that heritage, though:
- it invents very little. The container format (jar) is well known, XML is well known, it builds on HTML for semantic structure, it uses other standards (XLink, XForms, SVG, etc.) where it makes sense to. It is, in effect, a "common subset" of standards which are all useful in creating documents (e.g., HTML is great, but you can't store images easily in an HTML file [tho obviously, yes, it is possible...]). This is in stark contrast to, e.g., MS XML.
- it has been well-designed from the start to actually improve the current state of the art, not replicate it. E.g., the metadata system is good and getting better.
- unlike text/html, competing implementations are actually interoperable: vendors are working through OASIS, which has standardised it from the start, and are making sure things work. HTML standards came a little late in the game, and there are still text/html pages out there which my poor Firefox can't handle.
There are a ton of reasons why OpenDocument isn't just "another format", but actually a significant step forward.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
Nah, the explorer downloads an open-source scanning-tunnelling microscope and feeds it into his matter compiler. A few minutes later he's scanning the pit patterns and uploading the resulting images into VR so he can use the CDR-simulator plugin for Mame to read the data.
text/plain isn't a format. text/plain plus an encoding is a format. Which encoding would you like? Latin-1? That's defined in ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, which costs ~50USD to buy. UTF-8? That's defined in ISO/IEC 10646:2003, which costs ~90USD to buy. Want text/html? On top of the character encoding issues, you'll also have to refer to the ISO 8879:1986 standard, which costs ~170USD to buy.
What you claim are "truly open standards" are built on top of for-pay standards. You can't implement them fully and properly without paying for the details. Why do you think virtually no browsers got HTML comments right in the Acid2 test? It's because it's an esoteric feature of ISO 8879:1986 that you only find out about when you pay for the standard.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha