Group: 2008 progress shows ODF will prevail
It was a good year for Open Document Format (ODF), which gained support from governments across the world in 2008 as its backers continued to promote it as an international standard for XML-based document exchange, according to the ODF Alliance.
Despite the fact that ODF's rival, OOXML -- a format created by Microsoft for its Office 2007 suite -- was also approved by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) earlier this year as an international standard, ODF Alliance Managing Director Marino Marcich believes that ODF will eventually win out as the dominant standard for document formats.
"I think that we're dealing with two formats to accomplish the exact same task," he said Tuesday. "At the end of the day, two formats for the same task just generates confusion and cost."
Marcich cited progress ODF made in the year and outlined in the ODF Alliance's annual report as proof that ODF will eventually beat OOXML. Governments around the world are currently setting interoperability guidelines for the technology used in their agencies, and are standardizing file formats a part of that decision.
ODF has now been approved as a technology standard for document exchange in 16 countries, including Brazil, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Russia, and Germany, according to the report. In the Netherlands, government agencies must select ODF-supported products in technology purchases of €50,000 (US$69,920) or more, and in Brazil ODF also has been mandated for use in government agencies.
OOXML, on the other hand, is only being piloted alongside ODF in Denmark, and only the U.S. state of Massachusetts has approved OOXML as a standard, he said.
ODF also gained more support among word-processing applications from major technology vendors, Marcich said. Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword and OpenOffice.org's desktop and portable applications all now support ODF as a file format.
On the contrary, "I can count on my left hand how many .docx's I've received," he said, referring to the file extension for default Office 2007 files. However, to be fair, the OOXML/.docx implementation in Office 2007 differs from current OOXML specification, which has been altered through the standards process and is now known as ECMA 376.
Still, it's true that the default file format for exchanging most Office documents now is .doc, the default binary document file extension for Office before Office 2007. Even Marcich acknowledged that "the old binaries dominate the landscape" right now.
Unlike Marcich, Microsoft still believes there is room for more than one XML-based file format, said Dough Mahugh, a Microsoft senior program manager for Office interoperability, in an e-mail Tuesday.
