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South Africa Adopts ODF as a Government Standard
ais523 writes "As reported by Tectonic, South Africa's new Mininimum Interoperability Standards (pdf) for Information Systems in government (MIOS) explain the new rules for which data formats will be used by the government; according to that document, all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March, and the government aims to use one of its three approved document formats (UTF-8 or ASCII plain text, CSV, or ODF) for all its published documents by the end of 2008. A definition of 'open standard' is also included that appears to rule out OOXML at present (requiring 'multiple implementations', among other things that may also rule it out)."
Except that PDF is an open standard, and a very good presentation format.
It only sucks if you want to edit the document.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Although PDFs are great when you view them in Xpdf or Evince or the Mac OS X viewer thing, the common PDF viewer for Windows - Adobe Acrobat Reader - is a bloated piece of crap that makes Firefox freeze while it loads as a browser plugin. I'd guess that most of the PDF haters are Windows users, or users who install Acrobat Reader out of habit rather than using the native viewer that their Unixish system provides.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Or you could choose to not load it inside your browser.
Ohh and it's very modular, preventing it from loading crap plugins when you don't need javascript and what not in your pdfs will speed it up to almost zippy.
The thing to consider is that SA requires That could be a problem when trying to get the various old-versions-of-Word things to work, since the "intellectual rights" to "FuckShitUpLikeWord97" and "BreakCrapLikeWord95" are a) inextricably tied into the spec and b) absolutely not going to be forthcoming from MS for anyone who wants to actually produce a complete, fully-compliant implementation. Anyone think they even have those things defined in writing? I don't!
I'd say this one is game, set, and match to ODF. OOXML just cannot fulfill the access requirements if anyone tries to actually implement it in its entirety, and since it sounds like SA is on a total OSS kick one can probably safely assume that they will be demanding multiple implementations that comply down to every last comma, semi-colon and full-stop.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
Sorry for posting AC. This is huge. South Africa is a populous country.
However, does anyone have links to their analyses? One criticism in Massachusetts was that the Massachusetts CIO Office did not sufficiently evaluate all of the factors relevant to a transition to ODF. The Massachusetts comptroller issued a scathing audit listing the many items which their CIO should have looked at first, and failed to.
I have read the linked South African document and it is filled with the same types of conclusory statements as were issued in Massachusetts. This is all well and good and all, but where is the background information, all of the cost-benefit analysis and the like?
It would be VERY helpful for other jurisdictions which are contemplating a move to ODF (such as Minnesota and New York) to know that there exists somewhere the type of comprehensive analysis which the Massachusetts comptroller decided MUST be completed before making any format transition, and, after the full analysis, the decision still came out on the side of, "Yes, we SHOULD do this after all."
So, anyone, please? Any South African Slashdotters out there who can point to more detailed justification documentation?
Please, please, pretty please. You would be surprised who reads Slashdot and how just a little bit of assistance could move mountains in the real world.
So ODFs would be better for viewing in Firefox? Seems to me they would be even slower, while waiting for OpenOffice to load.
Anyway, for faster speed you can use the 2MB Foxit PDF reader. I don't think an ODF reader would be easy to do in that size/speed, if possible at all. (But who knows - 15 years ago word processors fit on a floppy or two, and a reader would be a subset of its functionality.)
I see more and more documents being passed as .odt files (well I am an IBM business partner so not totally typical) it is much more reasonable to expect the recipient to use one of many free ODF compliant products or they might have Notes 8 with the productivity editors than it is for someone to send a .docx file and expect the recipient to pay to upgrade to read and work with the file.
Have you read China's constitution? Try it sometime. Then compare that document to the reality of living in the actual country.
:)
South Africa may indeed be beating the US in terms of freedom, but that's not something you can tell by looking at a piece of paper. No matter which document format it uses.
Hell, look at the US constitution some time and compare.
[ think ]