UK Cabinet Office Adopts ODF As Exclusive Standard For Sharable Documents

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @04:17PM from the won-the-battle,-working-on-the-war dept.

Andy Updegrove writes: "The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. Henceforth, ODF compliance will be required for documents intended to be shared or subject to collaboration. PDF/A or HTML compliance will be required for viewable government documents. The decision follows a long process that invited, and received, very extensive public input – over 500 comments in all."

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Why ODF? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-07-22 16:20 · Score: -1, Flamebait

Why do we have to use something so complicated and unreadable without certain software? Something like markdown or even LaTeX if you have smart users would be better.
That way you don't ever really have to worry about a document becoming unreadable with software changes or corruption.