ODF 1.2 Is Approved

An anonymous reader writes with news that the Open Document Format 1.2 specification has finally been approved. "The most important improvement to ODF 1.2 is the newly built spreadsheet support. The old format was buggy and had a lot of legacy problems. Therefore the new spreadsheet module was written from scratch. 'A complete clean room implementation of the spreadsheet formula was built,' said [Michiel Leenaars, director of the Internet Society Netherlands]. ... Another important improvement in ODF 1.2 is the support for Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata, a W3C standard model for data interchange on the Web. ... Instead of only being able to link to a URL, RDF allows users to link text in documents to other things like a V-Card or a calendar item. Companies can use this technology to structure their workflow."

Comments

Re:Yes but

[Bert64]

So both formats have flaws, but there are some key differences...

The guys behind ODF are actively trying to fix their flaws (hence this story)
The guys behind OpenOffice aim for compatibility instead of blindly implementing a spec that is flawed and noone else follows

MS could easily have implemented the same extensions to ODF, and they had already done so in the earlier ODF plugin they sponsored, which was BSD licensed so they could have simply reused the code. Instead, they chose to go out of their way to write a new implementation which they knew would be incompatible with everyone else.
They only implemented ODF at all to try and pull the wool over people's eyes, it was the bare minimum to try and fool those who were demanding open standards, while still trying to maintain their lock-in.