ODF 1.2 Is Approved 110
An anonymous reader writes with news that the Open Document Format 1.2 specification has finally been approved.
"The most important improvement to ODF 1.2 is the newly built spreadsheet support. The old format was buggy and had a lot of legacy problems. Therefore the new spreadsheet module was written from scratch. 'A complete clean room implementation of the spreadsheet formula was built,' said [Michiel Leenaars, director of the Internet Society Netherlands]. ... Another important improvement in ODF 1.2 is the support for Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata, a W3C standard model for data interchange on the Web. ... Instead of only being able to link to a URL, RDF allows users to link text in documents to other things like a V-Card or a calendar item. Companies can use this technology to structure their workflow."
Re:Yes but (Score:4, Interesting)
the common denominator here is excel
Is it really? Excel's problem with their existing ODF support was that it strictly adhered to the specification, rather than supporting the extensions that were used by OpenOffice. The common denominator is actually the useless specs of the previous standard that did not completely include everything that was required (mainly the fomulas).
It is similar to the useless standard of OOXML which is not representative of what MS-Office actually uses. If OpenOffice provided a complete implementation of the strict version of OOXML, they would not be compatible with Microsoft's product. Would you consider the common denominator to be Office or OpenOffice there?
Re:hmm.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice try. You clearly didn't serve on any of the standards committees. ODF1 wasn't a complete mess, perhaps you could enlighten us to where it was a mess? Unlike the OOXML I read, and I did read a lot of it, ODF was not broken.
Re:Compatibility? (Score:3, Interesting)
That is correct, the standard was incomplete and not fully functional in the 1.0 revision, and the 1.2 revision is aiming to address those problems.
That said, many standards are like this and have areas within them which are open to interpretation, generally those implementing the standards care about interoperability and will work together to work around the flaws in the short term, and fix them in the long term. Unfortunately this requires good will and doesn't work when you have parties such as MS who are intentionally seeking to subvert the standard.
As it stands, MS intentionally chose to implement their own extensions for spreadsheet formulae rather than following the general consensus everyone else had - namely to implement the same as openoffice (which itself is based on excel), and also chose not to participate in the development process for the ODF standard itself. MS actually went out of their way to implement their own nonstandard extensions, MS themselves sponsored the ODF converted plugin (http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/), and the source for it is available under the BSD license. It would have saved them a lot of time and effort to reuse this existing code which can already interoperate with other implementers, and yet they were willing to spend time and money to implement an intentionally incompatible version. A most despicable act if you ask me.