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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.

Along the way, both sides know that there is little margin for error. All it takes is for one slip-up in messaging, one missed appointment, one mistake or one technical snafu to create a hole that the other side will gladly drive a Mack truck through. The stakes are so high that both sides have done a remarkable if not awe-inspiring (though not always commendable) job in executing their global full court presses. For the ODF community, it’s relatively minor to have a few dissenters like Edwards and Hiser break ranks. But, should the W3C concur with Edwards and Hiser that CDF is the more sensible candidate (than ODF) to be the world’s international open standard for universal document interop and portability, solidarity around ODF could weaken. And any weakening of solidarity around ODF is exactly the sort of hole that Microsoft would look to drive a truck through. If an indicator from the W3C that CDF is better-suited for ODF’s job than ODF could lead to such a hole, a similar indicator from IBM would be disastrous for the ODF community. Although it’s nothing more than a wild guess on my behalf, I’m willing to bet that IBM is probably responsible for more than 40 percent of the global resources being brought to bear on ODF’s behalf, if not 50 or 60 (percent). Microsoft wouldn’t need a Mack truck to take advantage of an IBM insinuation that ODF is non-strategic (or, “transitional” as Edwards said to me in an e-mail). Global support for ODF would very likely unravel because of how many people from governments to businesses to the ISO would feel betrayed and Microsoft’s OOXML would be left as the only format standing. The ODF coalition might live to see another day and another battle with CDF as their savior, but the damage would very likely be irreversible given the long memories of most of those who were betrayed.

Whereas the W3C has very little riding on ODF (Format), IBM has everything riding on it. Alright, not everything. IBM is involved in plenty of other businesses. But, after investing so much in ODF and now being so close to its best shot at seeking the aforementioned revenge, the last thing Big Blue can afford is a material breakdown in the world’s interest in ODF.

The question now is whether that moment has arrived for Gary Edwards and Sam Hiser in whole or in part, or maybe not at all. In response to my post, Doug Schepers, the primary contact at the W3C for CDF commented that in his eyes, it was simply an “honest misunderstanding on their part, and perhaps overenthusiasm.” Edwards, who over the weekend, disclosed to me the exact content of his e-mails with Schepers clearly had enough and simply published those e-mails here on ZDNet under the heading An Honest Misunderstanding? Hardly! Play the tape!. You can read the e-mails yourself. But, if there’s any text in them that vindicates Edwards and Hiser, it’s the part where Schepers wrote the following to them (I’ve boldfaced the most salient point):

There are really two central catalysts for these actions. One of these is the feedback we have received from the regulatory environment. There is a high degree of interest in our working with other software vendors to improve information exchange through the use of standardized technologies.

In our early testing we are observing that every product implementing these standards has some level of variation from the written spec. If you've been around standards for a while, you'll know this is common, and requires dialog to establish best practices & patterns. This is our reason for joining the OASIS, AIIM and ISO committees,

Because ODF side-stepped the compatibility question, we were left to solve (continue solving) that challenge elsewhere; the aversion to dealing with legacy content created a real problem for customers who want to transition to more open file formats.

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.

I wanted to post a quick reaction to the latest Microsoft bullshit announcement, in which they reportedly plan to "add native support for ODF 1.1". The way they put is very succinct, intentionally probably, and it opens the door for wild guesses.First of all, Microsoft is a huge Office licensing monopoly. It's so big it even surpasses Windows in sales. Any decline in Office licensing would be dramatic for Microsoft's future. With that alone, you know that any announcement from Microsoft that they are willing to interoperate with other people's software, namely applications, should be taken with a grain of salt.Here is how, with the release of Office 2007, Microsoft intends to keep their monopoly in Office licensing :

Likewise, since Office 2007 is not a native XML application (the internal representation is a bunch of binary structure, not XML DOM)

REDMOND, Wash. — May 21, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. is offering customers greater choice and more flexibility among document formats, as well as creating additional opportunities for developer and competitors, by expanding the range of document formats supported in its flagship Office productivity suite.

With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.

It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office (Office XP and Office 2003), Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.

Greve told the BBC that genuine adoption of ODF would give consumers more choice. "People will no longer need to use Microsoft Office in order to interoperate. People could switch to GNU/Linux and choose OpenOffice or other applications that support ODF, like Lotus Symphony or Google Docs."

Now that ODF and OOXML are both set to be on the ISO/IEC books, it is useful to consider what the next productive steps are. For genuine ODF Supporters who are concerned that ODF has languished a little out of the limelight during 2007, there are a lot of useful things to be done. You don’t even need to join the OASIS groups or your local National Body or SC34 to begin. I suggest here are some things that will help the ODF effort coming into ODF 1.2.

DOUG MAHUGH, program manager for ISO 29500-based products, Microsoft: One thing to be very clear about here is this: When we say, "support for ODF in [Office] SP2," we intend to write very compliant ODF documents when you save a document. However, it's not a given that everything you can do in the Office UI is savable under ODF. As you're alluding to, there are things -- SmartArt, conditional formatting, things like that -- that we have in Office and that are popular features, where there is no way to save those in ODF, currently.The way we're approaching that, I can share a little bit with you: We're not throttling the UI, as you describe, where certain things are disabled. Rather, at the time you save, we're telling you, "Hey, you're saving in this other format; some information in this document may be lost." That sort of thing. And let me tell you why we made the decision to do it in that particular way: There are situations where some of that functionality may be very useful to the user, even though it can't be serialized out to the format that they're saving in.

The engineering decisions that were made in the original creation of ODF represent the engineering pathway and the innovations that were happening in the OpenOffice space. The engineering decisions and development pathway for Open XML represents that which was happening in [Microsoft] Office, and the feature sets are not in parity. In fact, there's a superset of features within the Microsoft Office set, but there are certainly features that are exclusive to OpenOffice that do not get covered in Microsoft Office.

We really hope to see ODF move to JTC 1 / SC 34 maintenance

five prioritized guiding principles for Office’s ODF implementation

When Will Office Support OpenFormula?

nobody knows yet when ODF 1.2 will be published as an OASIS or ISO standard