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The OpenDocument Foundation Inc. doesn't have any control over ODF. But its embrace of the W3C's Compound Document Formats (CDF) adds a new twist to the already acrimonious debate over the possible creation of a universal file format for desktop applications.

ODF group abandons file format in favor of W3C alternativeComputerworld, MA - Oct 30, 2007October 30, 2007 (IDG News Service) -- A group that was set up to promote the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) is abandoning its support ...

Soured Relationships "What's happened is that there's just not a lot of interest in their approach, and that has resulted in a lot of souring of relationships on the part of the OpenDocument Foundation folks," Douglas Johnson, standards manager at Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) , told LinuxInsider. The about-face in support should not have a significant effect on the move toward open standards, Johnson added. The OpenDocument Foundation's decision to support CDF, however, is puzzling, Johnson said. 'I'm Perplexed' "It doesn't seem like a good fit," he explained. "It's not designed for this, so I'm perplexed at their desire to go in that direction."

But markets and governments understand that Open Document is the appropriate standard to replace the old Microsoft binary formats for office communication.

Editor's Note: This is the third in a series of articles that examine why the ODF Foundation closed down. The leaders of the recently shuttered OpenDocument Foundation have moved their attention and efforts away from the Open Document Format and towards the W3C's Compound Document Format, which they believe will be able to neutralize Microsoft Office by repurposing those documents.

The real technical content of the CDF recommendations is in details of how to glue these various (XML markup) languages together once they all have been processed into their respective DOMs. It establishes conventions for how a script might reach across DOM boundaries, how events might get propagated across DOM boundaries and stuff like that. I won't go into this any deeper because you will get more accurate information by just reading the W3C documents. But the main idea of CDF is to bring these variously defined content types into a uniform "framework" so that scripts can operate more at a document level instead of being confined to their own document child.

An honest misunderstanding? Hardly! Play the tape! Instead of arguing about who said what when, let's just go to the record and see exactly what the W3C's Doug Schepers said to us in an eMail introducing himself. Keep in mind that we did not contact the W3C or Mr. Schepers. The following eMail was most welcome, but entirely unsolicited.

There has been quite a lot of hubbub recently about ODF conformance, in particular about how conformance to the forthcoming ODF 1.2 specification should be defined.

The proposal caused much debate. In support of the new conformance clause, IBM's Rob Weir described foreign elements (formerly so welcome in ODF) as proprietary extensions that are “evil” and as a “nuclear death ray gun”. Questioning the proposal, KOffice's Thomas Zander wrote that he was “worried that we are trying to remove a core feature that I depend on in both KOffice and Qt”. Meanwhile Microsoft's Doug Mahugh made a counter-proposal suggesting that ODF might adopt the Markup Compatibility and Extensibility mechanisms from ISO/IEC 29500 (OOXML). Things came to a head in a 9-2-2 split vote last week which saw the new conformance text adopted in the new ODF committee specification by will of the majority. Following this there was some traffic in the blogosphere with IBM's Rob Weir commenting and Microsoft's Doug Mahugh counter-commenting on the vote and the circumstances surrounding it.

Wow. Microsoft opened up today, taking a nearly 180-degree turn to announce its intent to support ODF, PDF, and XPS. Overall, this is a great, positive move. While unexpected, it's not surprising. Microsoft has been moving towards more open standards, like with its recent DAISY XML initiative. But it's also a no-brainer. Sticking exclusively with its competing Open XML was divisive, complicating IT's efforts to leverage the benefits that open source XML provides.

Office is NOT implementing ODF 1.0 from ISO. That spec is not representative of the marketplace today, it is not what is implemented in OpenOffice, it is not what IBM is using for Symphony, and it is not referenced in the Massachusetts ETRM policy.

In my opinion, the continued interest in innovation presented by those solutions will speak much louder than the formats themselves.

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.

Most folks see data formats as an inside-baseball issue, because they work in all-Microsoft organizations where incompatibilities are rare. The only hangup, in that case, comes when Microsoft releases new software (Office 2007 being the latest example). Invariably, the data format's been upgraded as well.

The data format wars have been going on for years and have provoked a substantial backlash. The anti-Microsoft crowd has an alternate data format, OpenDocument, that anyone can freely incorporate into any program, just as everyone uses the same old free, non-proprietary HTML to build Web sites.

Is Open XML an open standard? The arguments are pretty technical but boil down to this: Microsoft says OpenDocument is not good and that anyone will be able to implement its far more enlightened Open Office XML. Opponents say Microsoft has built into Open XML all manner of snares, deadfalls and booby traps to defend its monopoly.

People are agog that Microsoft has announced support for Open Document Format (ODF), but I'm not sure why. This was a foregone conclusion once Microsoft figured out how to move lock-in above the file level to the content network. In other words, to Sharepoint. Microsoft has been hell-bent on getting enterprises to dump content into its proprietary Sharepoint repository, calling it the next Windows operating system. I call it the future of Microsoft lock-in.