OpenDocument

Standards often are made by insiders, established players, vendors with something to sell and so something to lose. Web standards bodies organized as pay-to-play consortia thus leave out developers and users, although vendors of course claim to represent everyone fully and fairly. I've worked within such bodies and continue to try to make progress in them, but I've come to the conclusion that open standards need radically open standardization processes. They don't need too many cooks, of course; they need some great chefs who work well together as a small group. Beyond this, open standards need transparency. Transparency helps developers and other categories of "users" see what is going on, give corrective feedback early and often, and if necessary try errant vendors in the court of public opinion.

Quick! Do you use the Compound Document Format?! You, know, CDF … surely you use CDF, right? Chances are pretty good that you have no idea about what I’m talking about. Everyone knows Microsoft’s word document format and Adobe’s PDF, chances are pretty good that if you’re reading this on XML.com you’ve heard of ODF and OOXML, especially after the fairly rancorous discussions about ISO status for these two formats. Yet CDF, hmmmm … that’s a rough one. Didn’t it belong to Corel, once upon a time?

CDF was in the news recently with the implosion of the Open Document Foundation, originally established to endorse ODF, though in its death throes it briefly highlighted the CDF format as perhaps a better format for documents than either OOXML or ODF. This is admittedly one of those areas where it may be justified in looking at XHTML especially and going “huh”? How can that be a full document format - it’s used for web pages, after all - you wouldn’t want to use it to mark up a full book, would you? Document formats are a lot like religions - people are ready to defend them to the death if need be, yet at the same time it becomes easy to dismiss certain religions that don’t even seem to be religions at all (such as my personal favorite, the rather philosophical Tao). Could you mock up a brochure in XHTML and CSS? Actually, it turns out that its surprisingly easy to do just that - especially if you throw a little SVG into the mix and allow the possibility of embedding XHTML within SVG (for all those odd little bits of rotation and other special effects).

Did the OpenDocument Foundation recently shutter its doors for good because it was unable to convince Oasis to support its converter, known as Da Vinci? Or was it because OpenDocument Format was simply not designed for the conversion of Microsoft Office documents, applications, and processes?

But standards don't rule the computing world. Today, ninety-two per cent of desktops and seventy per cent of servers run the proprietary and non-standardized Microsoft Windows OS.

One prominent ODF backer, the unrelated Open Document Foundation, said in late October that it would stop backing ODF in favor of a more viable universal format called the Compound Document Format (CDF). Marcich said that "won't have any effect on the alliance or on ODF" adoption. Moreover, CDF, which is a World Wide Web Consortium format, differs greatly in features and goals than ODF. "We're talking about apples and oranges here," he said.

The OpenDocument Foundation, a little-known industry group that was originally created to promote the OpenDocument Format (ODF), has closed its doors after controversially dropping support for ODF in favor of an obscure W3C format.

Just because we are garage challenged doesn't mean we can't find the back door to the big house :) The larger issue at stake here is not whether or not we have a garage, or what our contribution to ODF has been over the course of five years as active members of OASIS ODF. What it really comes down to is the implementation of ODF in the real world.

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

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."

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.

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 ...

As editing increasingly moves onto the web, its safe to say that the document of choice will be neither ODF nor OOXML, both of which gain their power on the basis of supporting legacy word processing systems. Instead, what seems to be emerging from the W3C is something that is not an office suite because it didn’t evolve from one, but that nonetheless is capable of most if not all of the same functions that office suite documents pose.

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.

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.

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.

the OpenDocument Foundation had decided to back away from work on ODF in favor of CDF (a W3C-backed standard) out of a belief that ODF wouldn’t achieve the real-world interoperability goals the OpenDocument Foundation was originally created to achieve

The point being -- it doesn't matter if the folks backing ODF are right. It doesn't matter that ODF is a more-credible, streamlined, logical and transparent spec than OOXML. What matters is that Microsoft is giving corporate developers what they want -- an XML-paved road directly into the Microsoft Office suite found on 90 percent of corporate desktops. And what's more, the company is upping the ante, with Visual Studio Tools for Office, new Office Business Applications and innovations like the Office 2007 Fluent UI. So the challenge for ODF proponents is a steep one. Even if they win the battle, and somehow deny Microsoft ISO approval, they can still lose the war. Because in the end, it doesn't really matter who is right. What matters is who can deliver the most compelling value to IT organizations married to the Microsoft Office suite.

A while back the OpenDocument Foundation folded up, withdrawing its support for the ODF in favor of CDF. The reason for the switch is buried in the details of ODF community’s denial to be fully interoperable with Microsoft Office, which might have helped in migrating to ODF without affecting the processes. So, there was something bigger here playing it up. Matt Assay notes that Microsoft Sharepoint might kill ODF more than anything else. It is the process stupid! People want to move to ODF, but without having to re-engineer their business processes.

The OpenDocument Foundation was formed in 2005, with the mission "to provide a conduit for funding and support for individual contributors to participate in ODF development" at the standards body OASIS. So, at a time when backing for the ODF format seems to be gaining in strength around the world, eyebrows were naturally raised when Sam Hiser, the Foundation's Vice President and Director of Business Affairs, wrote on October 16 that it was no longer supporting ODF: