File Formats Blog

The Open Document Foundation and Open Document Format have no inherent connection to one another, and this is causing a certain amount of confusion in tech news circles. ODF (the group) has decided it doesn't want ODF (the format). This isn't really as catastrophic as it might sound.

Open Document Foundation is Internet-oriented, and is, in its own words, "hell bent on a quest for a universal file format." Open Document Format turned out to be the wrong fit for this, and they couldn't convince OASIS to make the changes they wanted. Specifically, their attempt to create an ODF plugin for Microsoft Office, called da Vinci (making it "da Vinci code," no doubt), ran up on the rocks. Without such a plugin, a transition from MS Office to an open format (not counting Microsoft's Open XML) is more difficult.

Open Document Foundation is now aiming at W3C's Compound Document Formats (CDF).

Labels: XML

# posted by Gary McGath @ 9:34 AM