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."

Comments

Re:not that I would be against..

[16384]

Not anymore, now lyx support windows. See http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/Windows

Canards

[Tony]

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.

Re:Dark age already upon us

[dylan_-]

I know, all of my data stored on my Commodore 128 can't be ported to my Linux machine since it doesn't have drivers for the 1571.

Actually, this page has exactly that.

Re:THE one truly open format?

[albalbo]

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.