The International Organization for Standardization's OpenDocument Format standard is broken and needs to be mended, according to an expert who claimed to have carried out tests on the format.
Alex Brown, a document-format expert who is convenor of the process to standardize Office Open XML (OOXML), posted a blog this week reporting the results of tests which he claimed revealed that OpenOffice documents did not conform to the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO's) version of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard.
Speaking to ZDNet UK this week, Brown, who reported similar problems between Microsoft Office 2007 documents and the OOXML standard, said the standardized version of ODF, known as ISO/IEC 26300:2006, "has a defect which prevents any document claiming validity from being actually valid. Consequently, there are no XML documents in existence which are valid to ISO ODF."
There is a critical flaw in the ODF schema defined by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (Oasis) and approved by ISO as ISO/IEC 26300:2006, according to Brown's blog, which means that no XML document can conform to the standard. Although the flaw invalidates ODF as a standard, it is relatively easy to fix, and Brown provided a defect report and suggested fix in his blog.
Even using a mended schema, Brown found in a "smoke test" that OpenOffice still does not produce valid standard documents: "This is to be expected and is a mirror case of what was found for Microsoft Office 2007." A smoke test is not a complete test, but the equivalent of starting up a car engine to see if it smokes, he explained.
Microsoft Office 2007 has not caught up with the ISO standard based on OOXML because changes were implemented in an ISO meeting, but OpenOffice has "bypassed" ISO/IEC 26300:2006, said Brown: "It aims at its consortium standard, just as Microsoft Office does".
Although OpenOffice is only one implementation of ODF, it is more popular than other ODF-based applications, such as KOffice, said Brown, and is therefore a good test. Brown took the same document that he used in his test of Microsoft Office 2007's conformance to the OOXML standard, saved it using OpenOffice and tested the resulting .odt (ODF format) file. It produced thousands of errors, most of which were very similar to each other.
The ODF community has yet to respond to Brown's findings and is currently working on a new version of ODF, version 1.2, for submission to ISO. Brown said his suggested change should be built into the ISO standard, based on ODF 1.0. "Technically this is not huge news," Brown told ZDNet UK, "but ISO/IEC 26300:2006 is currently the only ODF standard and ISO should fix problems when they have been found."
Although Brown has been labelled as an OOXML supporter, he said he is in favour of all good standards and that, by offering a fix to ODF, he is actually supporting the document format. Brown referred to a post by Patrick Durusau, editor of the ODF standard, in which Durusau argued that standards supporters should promote and develop their own standards instead of "bashing" others.
"There may be flaws in ODF, but it is quite usable as it is," said John McCreesh, OpenOffice's marketing lead in the UK. He maintained that ODF is superior to OOXML, and that OpenOffice's team is uncovering problems with inputting OOXML documents: "If you do what the specification says, it does not look the same as it does in Office Word 2007. People want compatibility with Word 2007, not with some document that's alleged to say what the specification is."
Fundamentally, the issue is allowing user companies to be sure that their documents, which contain their intellectual property, will still be readable in 20 years' time, said McCreesh.
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The community already responded:
ODF Validation for Dummies
[Updated 4 May 2008, with additional rebuttal at the end]
Alex Brown has a problem. He can't figure out how to validate ODF documents. Unfortunately, when he couldn't figure it out, he didn't ask the OASIS ODF TC for help, which would have been the normal thing to do. Indeed, the ODF TC passed a resolution back in February 2007 that said, in part:
That the ODF TC welcomes any questions from ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 and
member NB's regarding OpenDocument Format, the functionality it
describes, the planned evolution of this standard, and its relationship
to other work on the technical agenda of JTC1/SC34. Questions and
comments can be directed to the TC chair and secretary whose email
addresses are given at
(web link)
or through the comments facility at
(web link)
So it is rather uncollegial of Alex to refuse such an open, transparent way of getting his questions answered. But Alex didn't avail himself of that avenue. He just assumed if he couldn't figure out how to validate ODF then it simply couldn't be done, and that ODF was to blame. This is presumptuous. Does he think that in the three years since ODF 1.0 became a standard, that no one has tried to validate a document?
(web link)
Posted by ricardo J nunes on Monday, May 05 2008 04:49 PM