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: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: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