UK Cabinet Office Adopts ODF As Exclusive Standard For Sharable Documents 164
Andy Updegrove writes: "The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. Henceforth, ODF compliance will be required for documents intended to be shared or subject to collaboration. PDF/A or HTML compliance will be required for viewable government documents. The decision follows a long process that invited, and received, very extensive public input – over 500 comments in all."
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Informative)
You're clearly misinformed. ODF was the first document format ever to become an industry standard (ISO/IEC 26300 [iso.org]).
Microsoft then suddenly decided it also wanted to be kind of open and standardized and drafted ISO/IEC 29500 [iso.org]
There have been lots of discussions about ISO/IEC 29500 also on slashdot, because of the lack of necessity of another ISO document standard and how MS got it approved, the lack of a reference implementation (Office 2007 wasn't OOXML compliant), the reference to software patents within the standard and the way ISO 29500 got approved.
The way MS acted when getting OOXML ISO approved is just one of the reasons why I always have "Fat Tony's" voice in my head when reading their public statements.
So in a nutshell, OOXML was MS way to be a little like FOSS.
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Informative)
I use ODF but no-one else does because MS Office doesn't properly support it, I'm crippling my ability to share documents around purely for ideological reasons.
Microsoft OSs are down to 14% market share.
It simply makes no sense to continue using their outdated lockin-inspired formats. The world needs to transition to document editing formats that're portable across whatever computing devices users want to buy.
ODF was designed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium to be that set of formats in 2005, and was only derailed by an intense and deeply corrupt effort by Microsoft. It's incredibly sad that we've had to wait for almost a decade for governments to finally start the transition.
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Informative)
For what it's worth, ODF is XML, which nominally human readable. So is Microsoft's OOXML, a perversion that demonstrates clearly that "human readable" doesn't always mean what it says. The main difference between ODF and OOXML is that ODF actually is a credible attempt to be open and portable whereas OOXML is designed to achieve the opposite.
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Informative)
The main reason you might want a human readable format is for collaboration ;
So many of my customers have collaborative content editing requirements as follows
* All changes to be auditable
* Changes to be peer reviewed before going into the released content
Which basically screams out to be put in a version control system ; the problem is that merging sucks for binary blob formats.
You can close the gap either by creating better merge tools that understand your blobs, or moving the document structure to line-based text that merges well ; for a document of any complexity, you're going to need the improved merge tools, but line-based text makes sense for those who can read it without the GUI tools.
As programmers we fill the role of that improved merge tool for the content that we manage ; we forget that for most people, parsing and grokking even something as simple as nicely prettified HTML is akin to reading Sanskrit blindfolded from stone tablets wearing gloves.
I agree though, I want to move most of my technical authors to Markdown so that I can have an easy platform for converting their content to multiple formats for consumption.