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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.
Salmon spend their whole life swimming in the ocean eating so that they grow strong and healthy so that when they return to their spawning pools they have enough energy to spread their milt before sinking to the creekbed, exhausted and dead. They get so beaten up by the force of the water which flows backwards towards the ocean that it seems almost pointless for them to make the trek all the way back to the waters of their birth. But they do this, despite having 90% of the OS market running Microsoft applications and with most application users using Microsoft Word to draft their documents. The battle to swim upstream to mate and die is one that must be fought. The survival of the wild salmon stock depends on these brave fish to face the torrents and rapids and emerge beaten and worn in the quiet streams of the Pacific Northwest.
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
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
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
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.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
MartinJW: Surely it has no impact on how and where the OD format can be used.
Summary: This means it can be implemented into any system, be it free software/open source or a closed proprietary product, without royalties.
Yeah, I really wish they would have spelled it out for us...
You mean that the APIs for working with (MS) office files are well documented, not the formats themselves.
Yes like TCP/IP, ANSI/Unicode, HTML, CSS. You know those obsolete standards that nobody uses anymore. :P
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Now that it's an ISO standard, perhaps the ISO would be so kind as to make its use part of one of those big compliance standards. This way, companies that want to be ISO 31337 (or whatever number they're up to now) compliant will have to use ODF as their primary means of storing and transmitting documents. After all, what's the use of a new standard if nobody feels compelled to use it? In addition to encouraging the use of open formats, it will give companies a reason to explore their options as far as office automation software.
Let's see some mass migrations from MS Office to OpenOffice.org and other such Open Source office suites. A few large corporations making the switch will produce case studies and some of those nifty ROI projections the suits always drool over. A snowball effect would be nice. One company makes the move and triggers a chain reaction in all of their vendors, suppliers, distributors, subsidiaries, etc. etc.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
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.
h tm
9 .aspx
Office 2007 File Format Specs:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45-M.
Listing of MSDN Articles on working with the Office 2K7 Formats:
http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2006/08/31/59
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