California Joins Open Document Bandwagon

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.'"

Comments

Re:Minnesota also

[bigtomrodney]

From TFS

'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.' The one thing that stands out to me is specifying that it is XML-based. I have no problem with that, the two competing formats are indeed XML based but shouldn't the mandate of the state simply to specify the Open and Cross-Platform aspects?
What happens for instance if tomorrow all of us wonderful Slashdot readers co-developed a magical format that not only was open and cross platform but inexplicably worked with all currently available office suites without modification... ...but it wasn't XML. Does that disqualify it? I would rather see the politics of this issue left with the politicians, the tech issues left with the techies. I've seen other combinations go horribly wrong DMCA

Microsoft's open XML format:

[hoggoth]

Just specifying XML doesn't mean much, really:

<document>
Description of MS Open Format
<![CDATA[
37642364 78346478 23465789 34657834 65783465 78934653 47895634 78563478 65347856
56347825 63478256 34786578 34567893 45678934 65783456 78465783 46578346 57834567
34895723 48957348 90578934 75890347 58934758 93475892 ... more binary crap...
]]>
</document>

Here's my problem:

[superbus1929]

There's one company missing from the Open Document party here, and without it playing along, I don't see this lasting long.

I am, of course, talking about Microsoft. They refuse to accept the Open standard.

Until that happens, there will be problems. Yes, you could have .odt documents sent internally, but what if someone has to send a document to someone outside the company? Microsoft Office does not recognize .odt, and if you think that you can train someone to remember to send .doc files to outside users, and keep internal documents to .odt, then I have a bridge to sell you.