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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.

The issue we were discussing -- and what I believe the ODEF conference was
very much concerned with -- was whether ODF plus vendor-specific extensions
will be classified as conformant ODF. The market requirement is for
"Exchange Formats" and document-level interoperability.

I could repose my question as whether ODF v. 1.2 will "clearly and
unambiguously specify interoperability requirements essential to achieve the
interoperability," as required by JTC 1 Directives. As you noted in an
earlier post in this thread, you can't do interoperability if you use vendor
extensions.


> I see a standard as providing a shared vocabulary for buyers and sellers
> to express their requirements.


You are in error. This is a matter controlled by law rather than by personal
opinion. Standards are all about the substitutability of goods, weights, and
measures. A standard specifies all characteristics of a product, weight, or
measure in mandatory terms so there is uniformity. Standards are the
antithesis of product differentiation. Their very purpose is to eliminate
product differentiation.

Both ODF and OOXML flunk that test badly. Their interoperable implementation neither has nor can be demonstrated. Both are designed for the waging of feature wars, not for interoperability. Both attempt to legitimize market-leading companies embracing and extending their own formats. They are standards in name only. What we are watching is a contest to decide which big vendor formats will be allowed to undeservedly claim the title of "international standard."

Unless we add conformance requirements for the preservation of metadata and processing instructions, the less featureful apps will never  be able to round-trip documents with the more featureful apps. Our language should require that. Personally, I believe that the software-as-an-end-point client-side office suites are dinosaurs at the end of their era. They are being finished off by a thousand cuts as users spend less and less time using them and more and more time using other apps, such as web apps. ODF either develops methods for interoperability among all apps or it will die along with the office suites.
E.g., Microsoft knows this and is busily migrating its Office development budget across the Sharepoint/Exchange server hubs to the network. Meanwhile, this TC fiddles with preserving the 1995 software-as-an-endpoint vision.