Editor: Barry Leiba •
[email protected] Standards OpenDocument Format The Standard for Office Documents Rob Weir • IBM OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an XML-based open standard file format for office documents, such as spreadsheets, text documents, and presentations. ODF is application-, platform-, and vendor-neutral and thereby facilitates broad interoperability of office documents. lthough personal productivity applica- this was often the pragmatic choice. An ad hoc tions (PPAs) and their associated file for- file format, designed specifically for a given ap- A mats have been around for many years, plication, will typically parse faster and con- they haven’t been the subject of standardization sume less memory than a general-purpose one. until very recently. We can better understand In fact, to optimize performance, some early for- the current importance and relevance of stan- mats were little more than a direct serialization dardization in this area if we first consider the of their application’s internal data structures. technological, historical, and economic context Public availability of documentation for these of electronic documents. early file formats varied. Some vendors made After more than a decade of evolution, PPA their formats available on demand or published functionality has converged on a set of capa- them in book form. Others never released their bilities that are conventionally expressed via formats. Still others released them under re- three application types: a word processor, a strictive licenses that limited use by competi- spreadsheet, and a presentation graphics ap- tors. Interoperability among word processors, plication. Although Microsoft, Corel, Sun, IBM, where it existed at all, was hard-won and often and Google all offer PPAs, as do open source accomplished by reverse engineering and trial vendors, the difference in functionality among and error.