Group items tagged

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 ...

The OpenDocument Foundation has decided to end its support for OASIS's OpenDocument Format (ODF) and instead support W3C's Compound Document Format (CDF), which is currently described in the Web Integration Compound Document Core 1.0 draft. This move reflects growing concerns within the interoperability advocacy community about the long-term viability of both ODF and Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML).

The first time I heard about OpenDocument Foundation people not happy with ODF is from Stephen McGibbon post about Gary Edwards disagreement with Sun. Then comes Rob Weir’s that OpenDocument Foundation had moved away from OpenDocumentFormat. With Rob Weir post I sense some crack in OpenDocument Foundation over ODF. While Weir’s post continues its tradition of building up evidence to support his argument, he is known to be a very passionate guy about ODF and is not shy about attacking opposition, any opposition to ODF. Hence, in this respect, I believe I have to exercise a certain amount of caution when Weir start attacking someone new. Today, I came across Jason Matusow’s happy rambling about how OpenDocument Foundation is unhappy about ODF and appears to be supporting a single document format. Matusow view it as an argument that the “one document format” theory does not work. More on this later. Hmmm… Did OpenDocument Foundation change direction away from ODF? and what is this Compound Document Format (CDF) thing that seems to be the new love of OpenDocument Foundation.

Standardization by Corporation Maybe i spoke to soon. This just came in from ISO, the resignation letter of the SC34WG1 Chairman who has completed his three year term. There is a fascinating statement at the end of the Martin Bryan letter. "The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles. The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting “standardization by corporation”, something I have been fighting against for the 20 years I have served on ISO committees. I am glad to be retiring before the situation becomes impossible..." When corporations join open standards or open source efforts, they arrive with substantial but most welcome financial and expert resources. They also bring marketshare and presence. And, they bring business objectives. They have a plan. As long as the corporate plan is aligned with the open standards - open source community work, all is fine. In fact it's great. For sure though there will come a time when the corporate plan asserts it's direction, and there is possible conflict. At this point, the very same wealth of resources that were cause for celebration can become cause for disappointment and disaster. One of the more troubling things i've noticed is that corporations treat everything as a corporate asset to be traded, bartered and dealt for shareholder advantage and value. This includes patents and interoperability issues which not surprisingly are wrapped into open standards and open source efforts. Rather than embrace the humanitarian – community of shared interest drivers of open standards and open source, corporations naturally plot to get maximum value out of the resources they commit. A primary example of this is Sun's use of OpenOffice, ODF, and an anti trust settlement disaster that left them at the mercy of Microsoft.

Sorry Shish, you're wrong about ODF 1.2 Try ODF 1.5 or ODF 2.0, maybe. The metadata requirements for ODF 1.2 actually did include two way lossless translation capability. Unfortunately these features did not survive the final cut, and were not included in the April 2007 submission. You might also want to check the February 23, 2007 metadata proposal from Florian Reuter. That also would have delivered the goods and perhaps put ODF that grand convergence category of usefulness across desktops, servers, devices and web systems currently the exclusive domains of MS-OOXML and CDF+. Florian had devised a means of using metadata to describe the presentation aspects of content and structural objects. Very revolutionary. And based on the simple notion that bold, font, margins etc. are simply metadata about content and style objects. Where the train came off the track had to do with the concept of an XML ID means of linking metadata to content. Not that there was anything wrong with this mechanism. It's actually quite clever. What went wrong was that Sun insisted that only those elements approved and supported by OpenOffice would be allowed to make use of XML ID metadata. For independent developers, this is a serious constraint. Because of this constraint, the metatdata sub committee started off with six elements supported by OOo that metadata could be appied to. IBM then came in and asked for eleven more elements having to do with charts and graphs. The OpenOffice crew decided they could support this, so in they went. Then an interesting question was posed, "How are independent developers supposed to submit elements for metadata consideration?"

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.

ODF was dead-on-arrival not because it's a better or worse choice than OOXML (I have no idea which is better, really) but because the nature of those with UNIX DNA never allows these kinds of "open" agreements to succeed. They all just splinter. Every time.

In other words, I would like to lay out my printable documents in a way that’s familiar to me, for which I have tools that can support this and that can easily be changed without having to do a search and replace through a hundred distance instances of a paragraph. In short, I want CSS, acting on XHTML, generating my printed pages as readily as it displays that content to the screen. A previous blog from Michael Day about PrinceXML reminded me that I hadn’t had a chance to play with it. My previous experiences with XHTML to PDF conversion were, to put it bluntly, terrifying, and so, as I was downloading the JAR file I wasn’t expecting a lot. When I tried it, I wasn’t disappointed … I was stunned. I had taken an article that I’d recently written for XML.com and run it through Prince. It digested the ten page article and cranked out a PDF in under a second, and the quality was better than anything I’d been able to get with a straight DocBook/FO/PDF rendering. I looked up the documentation, and found that it supported the CSS 3.0 page rendering set, as well as support for columns (including columnar rules), it could be used to print SVG content embedded or linked to the main XHTML document, and it included a nice set of extension properties for handling headers and footers, internal links, rounded borders, and the full panoply of CSS selectors including nth-child (which seemingly no one supports), content search and the whole gamut of pseudo-classes.

So I think users need to understand, very clearly, that an ODF document/app of *either* conformance class has an EXTREMELY WEAK CLAIM TO INTEROPERABILITY. The "pure ODF conformance" sticker would be at best valueless and at worst positively misleading. So what I'd like to see is some real effort from the TC going into resolving this problem ...

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.

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)

Microsoft has won. They wanted the ISO timestamp. They got it. They needed it since governments (and the EU) want such thing for documents now.

ODF and OOXML are input formats designed for authoring documents. Those formats favor editing over preserving an exact final presentation. PDF is primarily used as an output document, designed for distribution and markup, and it favors exact final presentation over editing. PDF thus enables either of these authoring formats to be used to deliver a consistent and complete distribution of a document, keeping the exact appearance intended by the authors.

Interoperability is one of the primary reasons why I like XML in general and ODF in particular.

The proposed discussion list name is "oiic-formation". (2) A preliminary statement of scope for the TC whose formation the list is intended to discuss. It is the intent of the ODF Implementation, Interoperability and Conformance (IIC) TC to provide a means for software implementors and service providers to create applications which adhere to the ODF specification and are able to interoperate. As such, the purpose of the IIC TC includes the following:

It is the intent of the ODF Implementation, Interoperability and Conformance (IIC) TC to provide a means for software implementors and service providers to create applications which adhere to the ODF specification and are able to interoperate. As such, the purpose of the IIC TC includes the following: 1. To publish test suites of ODF for applications of ODF to check their conformance with the Standard and to confirm their interoperability; 2. To provide feedback, where necessary, to the ODF TC on ways in which the standard could improve interoperability; 3. To produce a set of implementation guidelines; 4. To define interoperability with related standards by the creation of profiles or technical reports; 5. To coordinate, in conjunction with the ODF Adoption TC, OASIS InterOp demos related to ODF; The IIC TC may also liaise with other standard bodies whose work is leveraged in present or future ODF specifications. These include, but are not limited to, the W3C and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34.

1. To publish test suites of ODF for applications of ODF to check their conformance with the Standard and to confirm their interoperability; 2. To provide feedback, where necessary, to the ODF TC on ways in which the standard could improve interoperability; 3. To produce a set of implementation guidelines; 4. To define interoperability with related standards by the creation of profiles or technical reports; 5. To coordinate, in conjunction with the ODF Adoption TC, OASIS InterOp demos related to ODF; The IIC TC may also liaise with other standard bodies whose work is leveraged in present or future ODF specifications. These include, but are not limited to, the W3C and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34.