Group items tagged

Unless governments and other stakeholders can get beyond the
narrow view of documents and interoperability as merely being exchanging data
from one similar application to another, and move towards the view that
documents and web resources need to be end points on the same interoperable
spectrum, we are selling ourselves short.

It is here that standards bodies should be more help: but I
don't know that they can be unless there is a stronger commitment to supporting
each others' visions better. W3C's mission statement is concerned with bringing
the web to its full potential, and W3C have traditionally used this to justify shying
away from old-fashioned compound file-based issues: the lack of standards for
the *SP (JSP, ASP, PHP) class of documents is a symptom of this, and it is
notable that much of XML's uptake came because it did take care of practical
production issues (i.e. issues pertaining to the document as it existed before
being made available as a resource —PIs
and entities—and after
it had been retrieved—character
encodings.) The industry consortia such as ECMA and OASIS are organized
around interest groups on particular standards, which makes it easy to fob off
discussion of interoperability. And even ISO, where the availability are
topic-based working groups with very broad interests should provide a more
workable home for this kind of effort, have a strong disinclination to seek out
work that involves liaison with other standards groups: satisfying two sets of
procedures and fitting in with two sets of deadlines and timetables can be
impractical and disenfranchising for volunteers and small-business/academic experts.

Actually, ODF is about to get a new manifest along with the new metadata stuff. Because we base that on RDF, the manifest will also be RDF-based. It gives us the extensibility we want to provide (extension developers, for example, can add extra metadata they may need), without having to worry about breaking compatibility. The primary addition we've made is a mechanism to bind a stable URI to in-document content node ids and files. This is conceptually not all that different than what I see in OPC; it's just that the unique IDs are in fact URIs. Among other things, in the RDF context that allows further statements to be bound to those URIs.

The commission said that as part of its antitrust investigation into interoperability with Microsoft Office it will investigate whether the announced support of ODF in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.

Kroes said on Tuesday that the commission keeps a close eye on interoperability and said the market should have the right balance of non-propriety and propriety standards.

'Standards are the foundation of interoperability'. 'Standards may, of course, be proprietary or non-proprietary. Much excellent technical development has been driven by non-proprietary standards - the internet is awash with acronyms for non-proprietary standards: HTTP, HTML and XML'.

CDF is one of the very many useful projects that W3C has been laboring on, but not one that you would have been likely to have heard much about. Until recently, that is, when Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser and Marbux, the management (and perhaps sole remaining members) of the OpenDocument Foundation decided that CDF was the answer to all of the problems that ODF was designed to address. This announcement gave rise to a flurry of press attention that Sam Hiser has collected here. As others (such as Rob Weir) have already documented, these articles gave the OpenDocument Foundation’s position far more attention than it deserved.

The most astonishing piece was written by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. Early on in her article she stated that, “the ODF camp might unravel before Microsoft’s rival Office Open XML (OOXML) comes up for final international standardization vote early next year.” All because Gary, Sam and Marbux have decided that ODF does not meet their needs. Astonishing indeed, given that there is no available evidence to support such a prediction.