Slashdot Mirror
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)."
What is with the PDF allergy exhibited by a number of slashdotters?
It works fine in both xpdf and gs. In fact I've never encountered a PDF which doesn't display in either of those. Further more, as well as high-quality Free (tm) readers, there are also plenty of high quality Free tools for generating PDFs.
Seeing as the readers are small and lightweight, PDF is a better choice for final documents than ODF.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In a remarkable development, all the seven islands of the Seven Sister's Atoll, seceded from their common government and declared themselves independent sovereign nations. UN approved their nationhood in an emergency session. All of them, (population 7, 21, 3, 23, 7, 5, and 0.5 respectively) have immediately applied for the P membership of ISO. The population count of less than 1 raised a few eyebrows. It turned out to be the National Geographic photographer who camps there every summer. It is widely speculated in slashdot that all of the will soon vote to approve OOXML.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
OK, I've just RTFA.
This is all relevant only for "Working Office Document formats". For final presentation, they're using PDF. For web pages, they're using HTML 4 or XHTML with testing in Firefox 2 and IE6, plus later versions. What is it with this tradition of inaccurate summaries on Slashdot?
Put identity in the browser.
...and they beat us to open standards!!!
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.
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
It gives you the chance to compare your government with one which takes a common-sense approach to document formats.
You can cry now, if you want to.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.