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.

In a resounding victory for Microsoft Corp., bills seeking to mandate the use of open document formats by government agencies have been defeated in five states, and only a much-watered-down version of such legislation was signed into law in a sixth state.

What are we to make of this? Several things, I think, and none of them reflect very well on the legislators involved.

The EU's member states have just thrown their weight behind the principles of Open Standards and interoperability. At a meeting of the ministers for telecommunication and information society in Granada, Spain, the ministers of the 27 EU member states yesterday issued the Granada Ministerial Declaration on the European Digital Agenda.

The Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as a national standard, the ODF Alliance reported this week.

Heaps of news and observations regarding document formats

In China the issue about the document format standard is even more complicated, because there's also the national standard UOF. Consequently, Chinese standardization organizations have to think what they need to do to proceed. Should they support a third standard, or not? How about unifying UOF with one or both of these standards?

After a recent meeting of the SC 34 committee, the ISO/IEC group responsible for OOXML, Groklaw are reporting that they believe Microsoft are trying to take control of the Open Document Format (ODF), the uncontroversial open document format standard.

As South Africa prepares to host the second annual ODF conference next week, momentum behind the Open Document Format appears to be growing stronger.