Microsoft Votes to Add ODF to ANSI Standards List

RzUpAnmsCwrds writes "In a puzzling move, Microsoft today voted to support the addition of the OpenDocument file formats to the American National Standards List. OpenDocument is used by many free-software office suites, including OpenOffice.org. Microsoft is still pushing its own Office Open XML format, which it hopes will also become an ANSI standard. Is Microsoft serious about supporting ODF, or is this a merely a PR stunt to make Office Open XML look more like a legitimate standard?"

Comments

Re:My Name Is Bill

[Falladir]

rtf is not an open format. From a popular commentary:

In earlier versions of this document, I listed RTF (Rich Text Format) as a more standards based way of exchanging word-processor documents. I have been corrected on that point innumerable times. RTF is little better than MS-Word format itself. It is a little better, but it shares all of the problems as MS-Word. Although RTF was advertised as a document exchange format, it never lived up to that. It appears to have varying features, and the various version of RTF that Microsoft products create have elements which only Microsoft Products can read. Note that this is not because MS-Word is a better product, but because Microsoft keeps elements of what it considers to be RTF secret.

Consumers may not care what format their stuff is in, but when they get a replay saying "sorry, I can't seem to open that .doc, could you save it as .odt?" they'll care whether their word-processor can do it.

Re:My Name Is Bill

[edwdig]

RTF is simply a version of .doc that's largely ASCII text. It's main purpose was to be a format that was easier for tools to parse. Windows Help files used to be based off it. You can still drop whatever random objects into it.

Microsoft hasn't stood in the way of ODF at all???

[mpapet]

Really???

Then what the hell happened in Massachusetts wanted to switch to ODF?? Here's a long-winded citation: http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/origin alContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1144104,00.html

No, they'll do what they already do with everything that's not a .doc (or whatever extension is next) make it _really_ hard to use anything but .whatever.