Document Wars

As you know the so-called OpenDocument Foundation has been telling the world that CDF is a better approach than ODF. Updegrove met with W3C's Chris Lilley, the "go-to guy guy at W3C to learn what W3C's CDF standard is all about." Lilley says CDF can't replace ODF. It's not suitable for use as an office format, and he's mystified by the pronouncements of the Foundation. Here's what Updegrove reports: To find out the facts, I interviewed Chris Lilley, the W3C lead for the CDF project, and his answer couldn't have been more clear: "The one thing I'd really want your readers to know is that CDF was not created to be, and isn't suitable for use as, an office format." In fact, it isn't even an format at all - although it has been matched for export purposes with another W3C specification, called WICD - but WICD is a non-editable format intended for viewing only. Moreover, no one from the Foundation has joined W3C, nor explained to W3C what the Foundation's founders have in mind. It is highly unfortunate that the founders of a tax exempt organization that solicited donations, "To support the community of volunteers in promoting, improving and providing user assistance for ODF and software designed to operate on data in this format," should publicly announce that it believes that ODF will fail. By endorsing a standard that has no rational relationship to office formats at all, they can only serve to confuse the marketplace and undermine the efforts of the global community they claimed to serve. So, there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. CDF can't replace ODF, according to Lilley. It wasn't designed to be used as an office format. It's good for other things. So, was all this media push really about ODF? Or about damaging it with FUD and giving support to Microsoft's assertion that the world craves more than one office format standard so we can all struggle with interoperability complexity for the rest of our born days? And is it a coincidence it all happened on the eve of the next vote in February on Microsoft's competing MSOOXML? Was Microsoft behind this? Or did they just get lucky? Microsoft representatives, like Jason Matusow, certainly gave support to what the 3-man crew was saying, so much so that ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley wrote that, "the ODF camp might unravel before Microsoft’s rival Office Open XML (OOXML) comes up for final international standardization vote early next year." Dream on. ODF is doing fine. It's the OpenDocument Foundation that is shutting down. But here's my question: did the Microsoft reps not understand the tech, that CDF can't replace ODF? How trust-inspiring do you find that? Or did they think that *we'd* never figure it out? Whatever the story might be, unfortunately for Microsoft, people aren't as dumb as Microsoft needs them to be. FUD has a very limited shelf life in the Internet age. There is always somebody who knows better. And they'll tell the world.

The OpenDocument Foundation, founded five years ago by Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser, and Paul "Buck" Martin (marbux) with the express purpose of representing the OpenDocument format in the "open standards process," has reversed course. It now supports the W3C's Compound Document Format instead of its namesake ODF. Yet why this change of course has occurred is something of a mystery.

Open Document Format The panel discussion will focus on a single question: what should the user community do, what actions should they take in light of competing Open Document Formats? Each of our industry experts will be asked to present their practical response.

just played a little with other ODF applications. Looks like Lotus Symphony can handle input fields with paragraphs breaks in it. The XML it produces is:

The ongoing file format battle between proponents of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) took a surprising turn lthis week, when a key ODF proponent announced that it intended to abandon the ISO-approved specification. The move by the OpenDocument Foundation comes less than two months after Microsoft lost a key ISO vote to approve OOXML as a standard.

The Open Document Foundation (ODF) has quietly ended all work on its da Vinci project after failing to secure approval from the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). The da Vinci project was to develop a class of plug-ins that would allow users "to create and edit CDF (compound document format) files in their existing Microsoft Office installations". That is to say, a user could save a .odt file within Word as easily as if it were a .doc format. document.write('\x3Cscript src="http://ad.uk.doubleclick.net/adj/reg.software.4159/applications;'+RegExCats+GetVCs()+'pid='+RegId+';'+RegKW+'maid='+maid+';test='+test+';pf='+RegPF+';dcove=d;sz=336x280;tile=3;ord=' + rand + '?" type="text/javascript">\x3C\/script>'); However, the organisation now says all work has ceased because OASIS has not granted approval of its generic extensions. Without this approval, ODF says: "We can not effectively convert existing Microsoft documents, applications and processes to ODF. The loss of fidelity and feature - business process specific information is too great."

Five years after it was formed specifically to promote OpenDocument Format as an alternative to Microsoft Office formats, those behind the Open Document Foundation are abandoning the OASIS- and ISO-approved document standard in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Compound Document Format.

There’s some weight to that accusation when you consider how the applications behind each format operate. For instance, Microsoft Office more or less sucks at handling ODF documents and OpenOffice sucks at opening OOXML files — but why? OpenOffice has largely refused to implement any of the proprietary elements of Microsoft’s Office and Microsoft has made only a passing effort at supporting ODF. The two sides may argue about which is the better file format, but in reality what they’re saying is “our software works better than yours.” From an end user point of view software remains the critical issue — far moreso than the document format itself. But the OpenDocument Foundation would like that to change, they believe that interoperability is the whole point of having a universal format.

But it is nice to see that at least some part of office document debate is actually on the real-world user’s side. After all, most of us really don’t care what format our documents are in as long as all our applications can open them. And right now that sort of cross-application compatibility is little more than a pipe dream.

A group of large technology companies is proposing a competing set of formats, and has formed an alliance to confuse the market, and at least double the work of any developer who might want to support their products (with almost no installed base) alongside Microsoft's (with a monopolistic dominant installed base). It's not surprising that the group is lead by the detritus of the last generation of tech companies. The thriving companies, Google, Yahoo and others have the good sense to sit this time and money-waster out.  

Here's what Chris Lilley had to say, reconstructed from my notes (in other words, this is not a direct quote): So we were in a meeting when these articles about the Foundation and CDF started to appear, and we were really puzzled.  CDF isn't anything like ODF at all – it's an "interoperability agreement," mainly focused on two other specifications - XHTML and SVG.  You'd need to use another W3C specification, called Web Interactive Compound Document (WICD, pronounced "wicked"), for exporting, and even then you could only view, and not edit the output.  The one thing I'd really want your readers to know is that CDF (even together with WICD) was not created to be, and isn't suitable for use, as an office format.  Here are some other takeaways from my conversation with Chris: Although they would be welcome to become members, Neither Gary, Sam nor Marbux are members of W3C or the CDF working group The W3C has never been contacted by anyone from the Foundation about CDF.  After the articles began appearing, the W3C sent an inquiry to the Foundation, and received only a general reply in response The CDF working group was not chartered to achieve conversion between formats Although he hasn't spent a lot of time trying to unravel what Gary has written on the subject, he can't make any sense out of why the Foundation thinks that CDF makes sense as a substitute for ODF

XML 2007 Conference XML 2007 is the world’s largest and longest-running conference devoted to XML and other open data and document technologies. Our theme for 2007 is XML in Practice, focusing on the lessons learned from implementing XML in production-grade systems. When? Monday 3 December–Wednesday 5 December 2007 Where? Marriott Copley Place, Boston, MA  

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.

Nov. 12: A great article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols announced that the Open Document Foundation has closed shop, alleging that the foundation’s founders Sun and IBM tried to sabotage document interoperability, and instead endorsing W3C’s Compound Document Format. I’ve had my differences with SJVN — he’s on the true-believer end of open source reporters — but he’s really captured well a complex story: in the end, neither the ODF nor CDF faction comes across as completely credible.

What is quite remarkable, if not a little confusing, is that an organization would not only put the brakes on a format it helped created - but do so publicly and authentically, as soon as they realized that the end result was not what they set out for it to be. Many organizations would just sweep such thoughts under the rug, and keep to their dead end strategy - afraid to admit the wrong turn they took at Albuquerque. I have to applaud the leadership body of the Open Document Foundation for having the courage to stand for what they believe. Bravo.

+1 gary.edwards - 11/16/07 Thanks for the consideration Anton. You might want to follow an emerging discussion now taking place at the OpenDocument Fellowship: Interop between multiple standards and multiple applications Check on the follow up post and understand that this is the same problem the da Vinci group tried to overcome in Massachusetts, when ODF hung by a thread in the summer of 2006; with the sole hope being a plug-in conversion process capable of very high "round trip" fidelity. To assist Massachusetts and the da Vinci Group, the OpenDocument Foundation introduced to the OASIS ODF TC a series of discussions and proposals collectively known as the ODF iX interoperability enhancements. A total of six comprehensive iX enhancements were introduced between July of 2006 and March of 2007. The first three sets of iX enhancements were signed off on by CIO Louis Gutierrez, with the full knowledge and awareness of IBM (they participated directly in those discussions and i do have the emails and conference schedules to verify this . Also, if you're interested in other issues surrounding the da Vinci groups use of CDF WICD Full as an in-process conversion target for MSOffice documents, there is a series of recent responses posted in the comments section of this blog, "Going to Bed (without my supper). One last note; I do have a response to AlphaDog sitting in the blog que, where i try to put the MSOffice to CDF WICD Full conversion, and the OpenOffice ODF to CDF WICD Full conversion into the larger context of the web platform and universal interoperability. This post will also briefly explain the events immediately preceding the decision to shut the Foundation down. Hope this helps, ~ge~

But in serving as that "glue," the Foundation's founders had recently said they believed CDF could fulfill the original goals of the ODF format - goals they described as having been circumvented by their current backers, perhaps in the effort to keep OOXML from being considered an equal player. To that end, they established what had been called the da Vinci Project, whose stated goal was to build a better bridge between OOXML and ODF than Microsoft itself is working on, using CDF as a go-between.Today, the da Vinci Project appears dead, as its home pages on Google were also struck down.

The reasons for the move to CDF was improved compatibility with Microsoft’s OOXML format the foundation claimed at the time. Cris Lilley from W3C contradicted. CDF is not an office format, and thus not an alternative to the Open Document Format. This turn-down is likely the reason for the abrupt ditching of the foundation.