Former OpenDocument advocates bolt for W3C standard
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The document format sagas continue as ODF gets competition from the W3C's Compound Document Formats.
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One of the major contributors to the leading open source alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite announced early this morning it will be offering additions to OpenOffice enabling it to support Office 2007's new XML-based Office Open XML format.
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ODF? It's for poseurs Large organisations that are considering a move away from Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) in favour of rival standard (Open Document Format) ODF should think again, concludes a new report.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Texas and Minnesota may become the second and third U.S. states to adopt ODF (Open Document Format for XML) as the standard file format for government documents instead of the file format that Microsoft uses in its Office 2007 software suite. Two separate bills up for legislative consideration in each state propose to mandate the use of an open, XML-based file format that is "interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications; fully published and available royalty-free; implemented by multiple vendors; and controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard," according to the Minnesota House of Representatives bill, which can be found here. The Texas bill, which can be found here, uses similar wording to describe the file format the states intend to support. The Minnesota bill proposes that the mandate would take effect beginning July 1, 2008, while the Texas bill gives the state's Department of Information Resources until Sept. 1, 2008 to develop a plan for the transition. Though the bills do not specifically name ODF as the document format under consideration, the explanation of what each state wants to move to seems to fit the standard. ODF is an industry standard supported by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), is available for free, and is supported by several vendors in their office suites, including IBM, Sun, and Google. In an e-mail to the IDG News Service, one of the senators who sponsored the Minnesota bill, State Senator Don Betzold, confirmed that his state's bill was written with ODF in mind. "ODF is the standard intended," he said. "It is my goal to make sure that the public has access to electronic documents in the years to come and that we do not have to rely on licensing agreements or code access." Indeed, proponents of ODF view the bills as another victory for the file format and another step closer to giving Microsoft Office the best -- and arguably only -- competition it's had in years. Office 2007 uses Open XML, a format Microsoft developed, as its default file format. "After Massachusetts, the ODF genie is out of the bottle here in the U.S.," Marino Marcich, managing director of ODF advocacy group the ODF Alliance, said. "We're encouraged that Texas and Minnesota seem to be following suit." Currently, Massachusetts is implementing a plan using ODF as the standard format for all state agency documents. Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to adopt ODF. Microsoft also has submitted Open XML as a global standard, and it is currently before the ISO for approval. If approved and adopted by companies other than Microsoft, it could theoretically fall under the description of an open, XML-based file format as outlined in the Texas and Minnesota bills. Novell plans to implement Open XML in its version of OpenOffice, and Corel plans support for Open XML in its WordPerfect Office software. In a statement from its public relations firm, Microsoft said it supports customer choice and interoperability and urges governments to also do so. However, the company does not approve of governments mandating the use of only one standard for file formats. Microsoft certainly is keeping a close eye on ODF and recognizes the need for its applications to interoperate with it. Microsoft funded the development of software that translates between Open XML and ODF. The software, called the ODF Translator, was made available in 1.0 form last week on SourceForge.net.
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There is a fascinating article on Groklaw called Searching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is "So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer."  There is also the Novell comment, "Only Novell has Microsoftâs endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."
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Microsoft is calling IBM out over its opposition to Office Open XML, saying it is attempting to create a movement to prevent ISO standardization of the format. In an open letter posted to its Web site, Microsoft claims IBM is trying to limit choice by pushing the OpenDocument Format.
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Revised docs handed in Microsoft has handed in revised interoperability information to the European Commission.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Denmark's government agencies will be required to handle two competing document format standards, the Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft's Open XML, during a one-year test period that will begin next year. Denmark is requiring both standards for the test period since neither are "fully mature," said Rachid El Mousti, senior adviser for the IT strategy division of Denmark's National IT and Telecom Agency. A third party will evaluate the results of the tests in the first half of 2009, after which the Danish Parliament will conduct a further assessment, the Ministry of Science and Innovation said. The government is also requiring that new products bought by the agencies be able to accommodate at least one of the standards. It is also studying how its agencies exchange documents, including their use of converters to change document formats. Denmark could decide to use one standard, both, or neither of them, depending on market developments, El Mousti said. Government backing for document formats is seen as significant because it could help promote wider use of the standards in the market. If governments mandate the use of ODF, it could help office suites such as OpenOffice.org, which use the standard, to compete more effectively with Microsoft's dominant Office suite. El Mousti said Denmark has felt pressure from supporters of both ODF and Open XML, which was created by Microsoft and is used in Office 2007. Denmark has maintained an open dialog with all vendors, he said. "In order for us to succeed not just with open standards ... we of course need to have the vendors with us," El Mousti said. A Microsoft executive softly chided Denmark's move to mandate standards. "While I still believe that mandated standards are not an optimal solution for interoperability, this is an important step" in recognizing Open XML as a standard, wrote Jason Matusow, Microsoft's director for corporate standards, in a blog posting last week. Denmark does not widely use ODF. Most of its agencies use Microsoft software, and most documents that need to be published are turned into PDFs (portable document format). Microsoft has been strongly encouraging governments and organizations to use Open XML, which was approved as a standard by Ecma, a European standards body, in December. Microsoft argues that Open XML has more features than ODF, but some critics say the specification is overly complex. On Monday, the state ofÂ Massachusetts put Open XML on a list of standardsÂ that could be used for documents in the future, along with ODF. Â
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(InfoWorld) - Google, which has been less vocal than some on the furor surrounding the standards process for Microsoft's Office Open XML, came out Friday in support ofÂ the ISO's decision to reject the specification. In a post on its internal Google Code blog, Open Source Programs Manager Zaheda Bhorat said that the company agreed with the decision of the International Organization for Standardization not to approve the fast track of OOXML and listed some of the problems company engineers have with the format. The ISO voted earlier this month to reject an attempt by Microsoft to use another standards body, Ecma International, to fast track its XML-based file format OOXML through the process to become an international standard. The process was riddled with complaints that Microsoft placed people sympathetic to its cause in key voting positions toward the end of the process in an attempt to swing the vote in its favor. The company's decision to submit OOXML to Ecma and then the ISO has been controversialÂ as ODF (Open Document Format), which many rivals support, already is an ISO standard for XML-based documents. In fact, one of the problems Bhorat cited for why Google disapproves of OOXML is that it is incompatible with ODF. Other reasons Google supports the ISO decision are that the company believes there was not enough time to review the specification; there are undocumented features of OOXML that prevent implementation by other vendors; and dependencies on Microsoft proprietary formats and technical defects makes OOXML difficult to fully implement, according to the blog post. "Technical standards should be arrived at transparently, openly, and based on technical merit," Bhorat wrote on the blog. "Google is committed to helping the standards community remain true to this ideal and maintain their independence from any commercial pressure." Bhorat also used the post to stump for ODF, which Google supports in its Web-based office applications. IBM, Sun, and other Microsoft rivals also are vocal supporters of ODF. "With multiple implementations of one open standard for documents, users, businesses, and governments around the world can have both choice and freedom to access their own documents, share with others, and pass onto future generations," Bhorat wrote. Issues raised by Google and technical experts about OOXML during the voting process are set to be resolved at an ISO ballot resolution meeting been scheduled for Feb. 25-29, 2008.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has won approval for its Offfice Open XML document format from international standards body ECMA International. ECMA's General Assembly voted by 20-1 in favor of the standard at a meeting in Zurich on Thursday afternoon, and will now submit the format to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for its approval. The vote against came from a representative of IBM Corp. A standardized document format will make it easier for competing software companies to develop products that can interoperate with one another and to edit the same documents. Products meeting the standard could find favor with governments, or other organizations concerned about interoperability. Interoperability is vital for the preservation of archive information, according to Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British Library and a member of the committee that worked on the standard at ECMA. The British Library archives electronic documents, but must deal with whatever format they arrive in. The development of interoperable software tools will make that work easier. "The level of precision in this standard is unprecedented," Farquhar said. The standard runs to several thousand pages. To help developers digest the standard, the committee has published a 14-page white paper explaining it. "The committee put a lot of effort into making the document accessible," Farquhar said. That accessibility is important if Microsoft is to win developers over to its document format, as the company faces competition in the standards industry just as it does in the software market. A rival document format,Â OpenDocument Format (ODF), has already won approval from ISO, and was published as an ISO standard last month. ODF is used by office productivity suites such as OpenOffice.org or Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice, and has gained the support of other companies, including IBM. Government officials in France and the U.S. commonwealth of Massachusetts have recommended adoption of ODF as a government standard. ISO approval "is a critical factor for governments," said Marino Marcich, Managing Director of the ODF Alliance, a body that promotes the OpenDocument Format. Microsoft's general manager for interoperability and XML (Extensible Markup Language) architecture, Jean Paoli, agrees that "some public institutions prefer standards that are ISO-certified." There are still several hurdles to overcome before Microsoft can obtain ISO approval. ECMA has asked that the standard be fast-tracked, a process to which national standards bodies now have about 30 days to object. If no one objects, then ISO Subcommittee 34 will spend five or six months examining comments on the standard received from the national standards bodies, and only then will the ISO's Joint Technical Committee 1 vote on the standard.
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An introduction to XML and DocBook: what is it and why should I learn yet another data format?
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Ligaya Turmelle has relayed some great news in her latest blog entry, something that the web's been needing for a long time - a new group from the W3C created specifically for enhancing the HTML standard.   Now I have to admit to being curious about what is going on - after all anything new dealing with the web affects me as PHP coder. Since the W3C is supposedly interested in input from the Web community and content developers, I decided to see who from PHP would be there. Granted it is very early for the formation of the group so it didn't really surprise me to see no one from PHP that I know or heard about in there, but I wonder if anyone from the PHP Group will become a "invited expert" somewhere down the road.   The group is looking for members to help define this next generation of markup on the web. Check out their page for some of the qualifications needed to participate and for some of the upcoming events.W3C Launches New HTML Working Group
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Thanks to some new developments in document standards, Office 2007 users will be able to share files with open-source office apps and online productivity suites from the likes of Zoho and Google. In Monkey Bites.
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The open source project to build a translator between Microsoft's new Office Open XML format and OpenDocument, the standard backed by OASIS, reached its first milestone Friday, releasing 1.0 of the technology for both Microsoft Word and competing ODF-compatible office suites.
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It's easier than you might think to create your own OpenOffice.org extensions.
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The Open Document Format saw a marked uptick in use last year across the globe, according to the ODF Alliance&#39;s 2007 report.Twelve countries and six regional governments have adopted &quot;pro-ODF policies,&quot; according to the group, composed of companies and organizations that advocate for the format. The latest countries are the Netherlands and South Africa, which require government agencies to use the format. Also, more than 40 applications now support ODF, and the Alliance&#39;s membership ranks are set to rise above 500, according to the report.&quot;Considering where we started when we launched the alliance back in 2006, the developments in 2007 are amazing in terms of the progress that has been made,&quot; said Marino Marcich, managing director of the group.&quot;It&#39;s one thing to recognize ODF as a matter of policy in an enterprise architecture framework and another to mandate its use,&quot; he added. &quot;Proprietary formats in the public sphere are going out of style and becoming unacceptable globally.&quot;The ODF Alliance&#39;s report marks another chapter in the long-brewing debate over Microsoft&#39;s Office Open XML document format and ODF, which is supported by the likes of Sun Microsystems&#39; StarOffice application suite and Google&#39;s hosted productivity software.OOXML is the native file format in Microsoft Office 2007, and&#160;Microsoft is attempting to get it recognized as a standard. ODF advocates have lambasted OOXML, calling it far too proprietary to warrant such a stamp of approval.Marcich echoed that charge. &quot;Microsoft certainly has the right to advance its proprietary format,&quot; he said. &quot;What it doesn&#39;t have the right to do is call OOXML open and interoperable. ... We&#39;d love it if Microsoft supported ODF in its products natively.&quot;Despite the prevalence of Office software, ODF nonetheless has a chance to thrive, Marcich argued.Today, he noted, Microsoft&#39;s&#160;DOC format, not OOXML, is still dominant. &quot;If the question is &#39;what is the future,&#39; clearly ODF has the lead right now,&quot; he said.OOXML cannot supplant&#160;DOC until the majority of organizations and users upgrade to Office 2007, he noted, a process that will not occur imminently.&quot;We have a window here where governments have time to make a decision as to upgrading,&quot; he said. &quot;I think 2008 will be a critical year as to which format will emerge as the format of the future.&quot;Another ODF advocate, Andy Updegrove, also expressed pleasure over ODF&#39;s adoption to date and optimism about its future. &quot;The tipping point has been passed. I don&#39;t think it will lead to a deluge, but progress will continue,&quot; said Updegrove, an attorney with Gesmer Updegrove in Boston. Updegrove serves as legal counsel to technology companies as well as standards bodies, including OASIS, and closely tracks the ODF-OOXML saga on his blog.Updegrove predicted that 2008 will be &quot;a tough year for Office,&quot; pointing beyond ODF and OOXML to broader trends in computer usage. &quot;The monolithic idea of an office suite is really eroding, and the younger you are, the more meaningless it becomes,&quot; he said.Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment Friday.Another win for ODF in the United States could come soon. New York officials are expected to decide which format the state will use in its systems. The public comment period for the matter had originally been scheduled to end on Dec. 28, but an updated document on the state&#39;s Web site indicates that the period has been extended to Jan. 18.
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Microsoft said on Friday that it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the OOXML (Office Open XML) file-format standards process.The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft&#39;s format and the possible standard.Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the OSP (Open Specification Promise). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then, Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company&#39;s Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to &quot;promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers.&quot;The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them as outlined in an article in Microsoft&#39;s Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML&#39;s rival file format, ODF (Open Document Format), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.