OpenDocument Foundation Slams Namesake Format And Calls For True Interoperability
The office document wars keep getting stranger and more convoluted. Last week the OpenDocument Foundation announced it was abandoning the format its name is taken from, and instead will support the World Wide Web Consortium’s Compound Document Format.
Naturally many other backers of the ODF format have lashed out against the move and with the lines fairly well defined — Microsoft in the OOXML camp and pretty much everyone else in the ODF camp — the Foundation’s move is a surprising one.
In explaining the move away from ODF, Sam Hiser, vice president of OpenDocument Foundation, writes:
ODF is writing itself into history as a meetoo proprietary, application-tied specification with no intention to provide the market requirement of universal interop. ODF is therefore a sideline drama, only useful insofar as it has provided a foil for OOXML.
In other words Hiser thinks the ODF/OOXML battle is really one about the applications used to create documents, not the formats themselves.
There’s some weight to that accusation when you consider how the applications behind each format operate. For instance, Microsoft Office more or less sucks at handling ODF documents and OpenOffice sucks at opening OOXML files — but why?
OpenOffice has largely refused to implement any of the proprietary elements of Microsoft’s Office and Microsoft has made only a passing effort at supporting ODF. The two sides may argue about which is the better file format, but in reality what they’re saying is “our software works better than yours.”
From an end user point of view software remains the critical issue — far moreso than the document format itself. But the OpenDocument Foundation would like that to change, they believe that interoperability is the whole point of having a universal format.
The OpenDocument Foundation would like to see ODF get better at parsing MS docs, but the majority of ODF backers aren’t interested in that move because a) it would mean corrupting the purity of the ODF format and b) Sun and other ODF backers care more about building a Microsoft Office killer than they do about the interoperability of your documents.
Or at least that seems to be the position of Hiser and the OpenDocument Foundation. What’s unclear about the Compound Document Format is whether it offers any better solutions to these concerns.
The OpenDocument Foundation’s move isn’t going to kill ODF by any means — it’s more of a symbolic gesture — nor is going to improve Microsoft’s ISO chances with its OOXML farse.
But it is nice to see that at least some part of office document debate is actually on the real-world user’s side. After all, most of us really don’t care what format our documents are in as long as all our applications can open them. And right now that sort of cross-application compatibility is little more than a pipe dream.
[via eWeek]
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