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California Joins Open Document Bandwagon

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stretching-the-lobbiests-thin dept.

Andy Updegrove writes "A legislator in California has decided that it's time for California to get on the open formats bandwagon. If all of the bills filed in the last few weeks pass, California, Texas, and Minnesota will all require, in near-identical language, that 'all documents, including, but not limited to, text, spreadsheets, and presentations, produced by any state agency shall be created, exchanged, and preserved in an open extensible markup language-based, XML-based file format.' What type of formats will qualify? Again, the language is very uniform (the following is from the California statute): 'When deciding how to implement this section, the department in its evaluation of open, XML-based file formats shall consider all of the following features: (1) Interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications; (2) Fully published and available royalty-free; (3) Implemented by multiple vendors; (4) Controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard.'"

2 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Text in XML? by hey! · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, obviously it doesn't need to be xml, but XML does have one nice self-documentation property that plain text lacks: the character encoding.

    If you've looked at project gutenberg texts, you can see why this is a problem. Not a huge problem, but a problem. When a source text has a non-ascii character in it, they have to put some sequence of ascii characters which will suggest what the glyph is supposed to be. This doesn't really preserve the information in the source document, nor does it make the document easy to read.

    So, you could have a trivial text XML format that has only one defined tag. It's still useful:
    <xml version="1.0"? encoding="us-ascii">
    <text>
    This is my text. It has no wacky glyphs so ASCII is fine.
    </text>

    vs.

    <?xml version="1.0"? encoding="utf8">
    <text>
    This is my text. It has wacky glyphs therefôre ascii sücks for it!
    </text>

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  2. Re:Minnesota also by foniksonik · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If it is an open XML based format then doing a conversion to whatever new format arises should be trivial (maybe not fast, but fairly easy with XSLT). SO better to put it into XML now and worry about what better format may arise later.

    This is good news... why be negative about it?

    --
    A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.