AboutWelcome to Free Software Daily (FSD). FSD is a hub for news and articles by and for the free and open source community. FSD is a community driven site where members of the community submit and vote for the stories that they think are important and interesting to them. Click the "About" link to read more...
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.
The OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance) is an organization of governments, academic institutions, associations and industry dedicated to educating policy makers, IT administrators and the public on the benefits and opportunities of ODF. Launched in March 2006, the ODF Alliance now has over 480 member organizations in 53 countries.
OpenDocument, that is: The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats. "Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom. By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for educators to customize and remix content before printing and distributing it from any desktop computer," Sue Gardner explained.
Lots of goodness has been happening with the Open Document Format. Well, not the format itself, that has been an ISO standard for some time and that kind of implies it gets a bit boring. Fileformats being boring is, much like in governments, a good thing. Boring means stable. And we need a stable Foundation. (bonus points to the people that got the reference ;) )
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.