noted: ongoing · OpenDocument! [ Tim Bray on OASIS OpenDocument Standard ]
09-July-2005
permalink email thisI'd missed this. Tim Bray ( one of the creators of XML ) notes the importance of this open standard for office application documents. He includes, of course, a link to the OpenDocument announcement from OASIS.
ASIDES: Note that this is about an open standard for the document format, as opposed to open-source software applications to process the format, such as Open Office (the two are, of course, very closely related :o) Also note that this is, sadly, not a revival of the wonders of OpenDoc as a standard for docucentric user interfaces and software architectures (see the Standards and Architectures Working Group's area of the site - especially its History weblog - for more about the story of OpenDoc).
ongoing · OpenDocument! (breaks inserted by Mike)On Monday there was what seems to me like a major news story: the announcementthat OpenDocument 1.0 has been approved as an OASIS Standard.As I’ve said before, OpenDocument is almost exactly what we had in mind whenwe built XML, starting back in 1996.
Right now, it is the only XML office document format that is standardized, andit is also the only one that is complete; Microsoft’s offering is full ofholes, starting with the absence of PowerPoint.It’s also completely 100% free of intellectual-property issues, anyone can useit for anything anytime anywhere without asking anyone first.Let me put it this way: if you occasionally create documents or spreadsheetsor presentations, and if you think that you’d like to own them,independent of your Office software vendor, well, you have exactly one choice:OpenDocument.
If those docs/spreadsheets/presos might be long-lived, or contain high-valuedata that you might want to re-use later, and you don’t use OpenDocument, wellthere’s a word for that but I’m not going to put it up on the front page atongoing.By the way, at the request of our friends in the European Commission, we’vecommitted to getting behind making OpenDocument an ISO Standard, too.
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