The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take.

I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I’ve only peripherally been paying attention to an ongoing meme on the Internet about how the World Wide Web Consortium’s Common Document Format (CDF) had been identified by the OpenDocument Foundation as a superior document format to the OpenDocument Format that it had been backing for so long.

When in mid-October 2007, the OpenDocument Foundation announced that the World Wide Web Consoritum-backed Common Document Format (CDF) was the heir-apparent to what it believed was a dead-on-arrival OpenDocument Format, many confused the ODf to be one in the same with the ODF and the latter to have one foot in the grave.

"...Okay, now, how about this one … do you work with (or even just read) XHTML? Probably, if you’re involved in XML work, your HTML conforms to a great degree to the formal XHTML standard. Good enough. How about CSS 2.1? Sure, who doesn’t. Okay, here’s a biggy -how about XMLHttpRequest? You do AJAX work?

As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format remains in ISO limbo, a trio of countries are pushing forward an adoption of the alternative Open Document Format (ODF) instead, according to an ODF advocacy group.

According to a press release issued today by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association, the government of Portugal has decided to approve the OpenDocument Format as the single editable, XML-based document format for use by government, and in public procurement.

The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) is an XML standard that lets you store and exchange office application documents, including word-processor, spreadsheet, and presentation files. Whether you try to perform special tasks on files saved from such applications or work on applications to process such files, you should become familiar with this important format.

"The commonwealth of Massachusetts has done a 180 degree turn and decided to support Microsoft's Office Open XML format in addition to the OASIS Open Document Format."

Okay, lets get one thing straight… Repeat after me: “The Open Document Foundation has nothing to do with the Open Document Format”!