OpenDocument Now Published ISO Standard

bobibobi writes "After months of revisions, OpenDocument receives status of a full published standard. The various stages of a standard's "stage code are also online." The OpenDocument standard has been developed by a variety of organizations and is publicly accessible. This means it can be implemented into any system, be it free software/open source or a closed proprietary product, without royalties.

Comments

Nice.

[Bright Apollo]

I've worked with some OASIS spec'd XML before, and while it's not usually the most elegant solution, having *any* XML-based document markup become standard is good news. I would love to start doing text-extraction directly from Excel, Word and so forth without having to cut out text, drop it into another MS product, flatten it by hand, etc.

Quick example:
      We do user requirements using Word. I wanted to extract them into a database so I can relate them
      to functional specs, use cases, code, etc (yes, we're just figuring this out now).
      To extract the requirements, I had to cut out each section of tables (Lord help you if they're nested,
      or misaligned, or misnumbered) and plop it into Excel, scrub it repeatedly (scrub those nubs!), and
      only then insert it into a database.

With XML-based documents, I just pull out all of the matching tags, form an INSERT around it, and off it goes into the db.

-BA

Re:Nice.

[hritcu]

You are missing an important point. OpenDocument is not Microsoft Office "Open" XML. OpenDocument is the document format used by office suits like OpenOffice.org and KOffice, and is not supported by Microsoft. Actually, I think Microsoft would have preferred OpenDocument to never happen, so that they can keep all their users well locked in their proprietary binary formats. Now that it happened, Microsoft responded by having their own proprietary XML format for the (very recently released) Office 2007. So, as usual Microsoft is playing catch up because they need to, not because they want to.

So even though for the usage scenarios you are describing, it makes little difference whether it's OpenDocument or the Microsoft "Open" XML, this does not make them the same. They are not.

Re:Hmmm

[heroofhyr]

From the ISO website's FAQ:

1.4 What does "international standardization" mean? When the large majority of products or services in a particular business or industry sector conform to International Standards, a state of industry-wide standardization can be said to exist. This is achieved through consensus agreements between national delegations representing all the economic stakeholders concerned - suppliers, users and, often, governments. They agree on specifications and criteria to be applied consistently in the classification of materials, the manufacture of products and the provision of services. In this way, International Standards provide a reference framework, or a common technological language, between suppliers and their customers - which facilitates trade and the transfer of technology.

1.5 What benefits does international standardization bring to businesses? For businesses, the widespread adoption of International Standards means that suppliers can base the development of their products and services on reference documents which have broad market relevance. This, in turn, means that they are increasingly free to compete on many more markets around the world.

1.6 What benefits does international standardization bring to customers? For customers, the worldwide compatibility of technology which is achieved when products and services are based on International Standards brings them an increasingly wide choice of offers, and they also benefit from the effects of competition among suppliers.

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/faqs/faq-general.html

Not a Microsoft core asset

[benhocking]

The simple answer is that OpenDocument is not a Microsoft core asset. It's not even from Microsoft. It was originally created by OpenOffice, a competitor to MS Office.

Yes

[Shawn is an Asshole]

There is an open source (BSD) plugin available. Microsoft is funding it. So are a few other companies. Quoting their blog:

Launching of 0.3-M1 release
By Jean Goffinet, Thursday 30 November 2006 at 12:04 :: posted to General

Last week we released version 0.3-M1 of the converter. What do those numbers mean?

• 0.3 means that we are now working mainly on the reverse conversion (from DOCX to ODT); the direct conversion will still continue to be improved, but it will be far less visible than during the previous months (we fixed a lot of bugs since the last release, though - the number of open bugs on SourceForge dropped from more than 100 to less than 50 at the time of the release)
• M1 stands for "Milestone 1" and corresponds to a set of features that were implemented according to the roadmap of the project.

For simple documents, the reverse conversion works quite fine, allowing users to manipulate OpenDocument text files directly in Word. Our main concern is now to make the process of opening an ODT file and saving it back to ODT as accurate as possible. That means that if we have to implement workarounds to convert features that are not directly available in one format or the other, those workarounds will have to be preserved during the reverse conversion. To ensure that this process works fine, we iterate it several times on one file, and see the final result as something we could call the "fix point" of the converter (refering to a famous mathematical theorem - but I'm not sure of the english name).

Once we have an acceptable result for direct / reverse conversions, we will enhance our transformations so that they can also work correctly on legacy doc files produced by previous versions of Word (there are tons of features that are marked as deprecated in the OpenXML specification).

Re:Bah, use TeX :-)

[tomstdenis]

You can like totally like use templates and such. Like for sure. TeX also supports includes...

\input{preamble.tex}
Dear Mary,

~

Sup?

~

Sincerely,
Tom St Denis

\input{postamble.tex}

Wow ... hard ...

Tom

Re:Committee-based standards == Disaster

[Alphager]

Hmm, WiFi is simply a logo that says that the devices implements the Wlan-standard corectly. The standard itself was written in committees. Wrong example. HTML OpenGL X window system POSIX Bluetooth ZigBee USB etc...

Re:Help me

[swillden]

OpenDocument is the format that OpenOffice.org and StarOffice use for their documents

Don't forget KOffice, Abiword, Google Docs, and about a dozen others that are in various stages of implementing OpenDocument support. Corel says they're adding OpenDocument support to Corel Office (WordPerfect), though AFAIK they haven't said when it will be available. I don't think IBM/Lotus is adding OpenDocument support to SmartSuite (Ami Pro, Lotus 123, etc.), but IBM is moving to the IBM Workplace suite, which is built on OpenOffice.org and, obviously, uses OpenDocument natively.

I predict that by the end of 2007 all widely-used and still-developed word processor and spreadsheet tools except Microsoft's will support OpenDocument, and that many will use it as their native format. This news of official ISO standardization can only help.

Re:Hmmm

[flakier]

Actually you two are both wrong. The current (2007) version of the office file formats are fully documented on the ECMA site, not MSDN (though MSDN does also have some docs on the file formats as well). In fact, it is actually the file formats and not just API documentation that you will find at ECMA.

Office 2007 File Format Specs:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45-M.h tm

Listing of MSDN Articles on working with the Office 2K7 Formats:
http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2006/08/31/599 .aspx

Re:The problem

[swillden]

The problem with those "standards" is that today this may be enough for all, but maybe tomorrow there will arise tasks for which the standards will not be good enough

Two points:

First, office document technology isn't likely to change all that much. Word processors and spreadsheets do pretty much everything they need to, and it's quite likely that improvements will be small incremental changes in the way users work with the tools (i.e. UI changes) rather than the sort of significant changes that require new data formats. Look, for example, at the fact that the Microsoft Office formats from Office 95 -- an 11 year-old suite -- remain unchanged. Microsoft is pushing OpenXML, not because the Office 95 formats are inadequate for storing all of the data required but because they think business want to be able to more easily generate documents by automatically transforming data. OpenDocument formats also easily accommodate automatic generation from other data sources, being both XML-based and fully documented.

Second, OpenDocument is designed to be extensible. If your application needs additional markup that OpenDocument doesn't provide, you can simply add it. Of course, other applications won't be able to make use of it, but the standard requires them to gracefully ignore and preserve it. Further, OASIS has defined a process for the review and publication of extensions. That process does not necessarily require ISO standardization for all extensions, so in most cases the extension would be widely implemented as an OASIS standard well before it completed the ISO standardization process.

Bottom line: The needs of office document formats haven't changed in over a decade and aren't likely to change much or quickly, but if you really need to extend OpenDocument formats, you can easily do so. If your extension is one that make sense more broadly there is a way to get everyone else to implement it fairly quickly.

Obviously, format extensions/changes can occur even more quickly and easily if a single company controls the formats and the software that uses them. That is an advantage of a monopoly situation. I, for one, think the disadvantages far outweigh the few advantages.

Re:Cool... now make it part of another standard

[kripkenstein]

A few large corporations making the switch [to OpenOffice.org] will produce case studies and some of those nifty ROI projections the suits always drool over.

Indeed, but hastily-planned attempts to do so that end in failure will produce enough negative publicity to stall the entire momentum. You are assuming that all such attempts will succeed, and succeed well. But this is not at all obvious, even though they SHOULD succeed. But, a switch to OO.org is still a switch, i.e. a change in how things are already being done - and any change has risks. Here's hoping that organizations planning to switch to OO.org will do so carefully and well.

Re:Standard but less avaiable

[Bert64]

The ISO certification is just that, ISO has certified the existing standard, so you can download the spec from Oasis or wherever else...

Structured, understandable, re-use of standards

[SgtChaireBourne]

So even though for the usage scenarios you are describing, it makes little difference whether it's OpenDocument or the Microsoft "Open" XML, this does not make them the same. They are not.

Actually the scenario described, parsing a document to extract data and insert into a database, is much more straight forward in OpenDocument Format (ODF) than in MS Office Open XML (MOOX). Take a look at the specs, even a quick look. ODF is much more oriented to structure, with straight forward labels and makes better re-use of existing standards. The MOOX spec is rather convoluted and focuses heavily on formatting and layout rather than stucture. There is a good Comparison of ODF v MOOX which goes into the details.

Why the ISO hatred?

[PWNT]

Why do all of you seem to have a distinct ISO hatred?

From engineering I have learned that ISO standards are completely voluntary. They provide a means for Company A to say, "I need 1,000,000 bolts adhering to ISO XXXXXX". They can then find companies which adhere to these standards and purchase based on best price. If a company wants to be ISO certified for a process they must pay for an inspector to come and check out the process (quality, ensuring, stuff is done properly, etc). I have heard other people bitch about how much it costs to do this, however, it is not your company being forced into the standardization, rather YOUR CUSTOMER is demanding a specified level of quality. These people who are complaining are really voicing a view that they would prefer to deliver a LOWER QUALITY good to a customer for the price of the higher quality good and leave the customer none the wiser. This is a bad business decision.

The example I give above is for screw production, however treat software as a commodity. Then software which read and write files which adhere to the standard are best. Software packages can be built to support these standards and greater emergent networks can be formed (I give the internet and it's effect on business. I hope we can all agree on /. that the internet has been a powerful force in business) .

To further my example, look into the history of screws or fasteners, there were many competing designs, and the 2-3 best remain today enshrined in some ISO standard along with all their derivative designs.

With the introduction of this ISO standard, business can more easily data mine, update, import/export, modify, and track changes. If any of you who read /. are CIO's or CTO's (information and technical officers) or people who have the ability to advocate ISO standardization for file types, do it. It can only benefit the mobility of your company. One can choose to make switches in direction rather quickly when all the data you store is in a known format. You could hire some coders to do internal tasks for you. There are NO disadvantages to ISO standardization for the customer. One can choose to purchase drop-in-solutions.

Simple questions like "We have ODT files and require support according to ISO XXXXX, can you provide this with your product." replace long drawn out negotiations about who owns what file format or whatever.

In conclusion ISO is important for customers.

If I am misinformed on any of these topics, please respond.

Re:Bah, use TeX :-)

[TheRaven64]

I'm currently writing a book in LaTeX. I did the entire outline in OmniOutliner, and when I was happy with it, I ran a script that created a directory structure, one per chapter, with all my sections, subsections, and notes in a tex file in each directory. It has some code listings, and these are pulled in directly from the source files and syntax highlighted, so they never get out of sync with the original (and, thus, are all tested). Oh, and on my new machine it takes 3 seconds to do a full build (including generating the index). For this kind of project I have a standard Makefile that handles everything for me, so I just do ':mak view' in vim, and it compiles and opens the typeset version for me.

For letters, LaTeX is also quite good, and since you generally only need:

\documentclass{letter}
\address{My Address}
\name{My Name}
\signature{My Signature line}
\begin{document}
\begin{letter}{Recipient Address}
\opening{Dear Sir,}

.... text of the letter ....

\closing{Yours faithfully}
\end{letter}
\end{document}

I can type that in less time than OpenOffice takes to start, but if I wrote letters frequently (I don't, I write maybe one per year) I would just save it in a template, which I would copy and edit. You could also wrap this up in a simple PHP script that would take some input in a few text fields and output a PDF for download very easily.

Re:Open source or a closed proprietary

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail it.

The Problem with OpenDocument

[mikearthur]

The problem with any standard is when people fail to implement it, or its implemented slightly different. I've spent the last couple of months working part-time on a OpenDocument exporter. The two main OpenDocument applications on Linux, OpenOffice and KOffice both supposedly open OpenDocument spreadsheets. However, neither's file's meet the specified standard. Also, I've used files from OpenOffice to try and open them in KOffice, and KOffice crashes on startup. Using files from KOffice to OpenOffice, they open, but are incorrectly formatted. So, for a developer like myself, the question is, do I write to the standard, or to the biggest software packager using that standard (Firefox). It's much like writing websites, and then having to hack them for IE, but sadly, this is occurring in OSS software. Essentially, until we see complete, working implementations, it's good that OpenDocument is an open and now ISO standard, but essentially, it doesn't really help free information interchange when Openoffice and KOffice are more compatible on reverse-engineered Microsoft file formats than open ones.

Yours Today for Only $285.00 USD

[Sentrion]

Add to shopping basket Size Price
  ISO/IEC 26300:2006 PDF version (en) 13368 KB CHF 340,00
  ISO/IEC 26300:2006 CD-ROM version (en) CHF 340,00

Interestingly, I can download the USB standard for free but I need to pay big bucks just to view a copy of the OPEN Document standard online? How OPEN is it when I can't even afford to see it?

I can download linux from Redhat at no charge, and Redhat is a For-Profit company, yet ISO is a non-profit organization. I can understand charging for the CD, but why such an outrageous price to download?

I just don't get it.

So much FUD, So little time

[flakier]

OK, enough FUD, time for some cold hard facts:

Open XML is *NOT* proprietary See for yourself: http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45-M.h tm

ODF is *JUST* as patent encumbered as Open XML is.

The owners of both ODF and Open XML do not and will not collect royalties (both have published a covenant not to sue)
Sun: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/ipr.ph p
MS: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx
Non-Legalese Explanation: http://www.bakernet.com/NR/rdonlyres/CC54A6B6-79E8 -4E0D-B290-C836D5F70867/0/OpenXML.pdf

To implement either standard, a developer need not accept any kind of licensing agreement whatsoever.

A user, using software that implements either standard, does not have to accept any licensing agreement that covers the either respective format's standard.

Thanks for playing :)