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ODF 1.2 Part 1 Public Review

2010/01/25 By Rob 7 Comments

Salt and Fresh-ground Pepper (photo by author)

A major milestone was reached for the OASIS ODF TC today.  The latest Committee Draft of ODF 1.2 Part 1 was sent out for a 60-day public review.

“What does this mean, and why should I care?” you might be asking.  That’s a fair question.

First, a quick review of the OASIS standards approval process.  The stages look like this:

  1. TC creates one or more Working Drafts
  2. A Working Draft may then additionally be approved as a Committee Draft
  3. A Committee Draft may then be additionally approved as a Public Review Draft
  4. After addressing received public comments, a Committee Draft may be approved as a Committee Specification
  5. Finally, a Committee Specification may be voted on by OASIS as an OASIS Standard

There is the possibility of iteration at most of these stages.  So we’re not done with ODF 1.2.   There is still work to be done, but we are certainly in the endgame now.

Also, it is important to remember that ODF 1.2 has been factored into three “parts”:

  • Part 1 specifies the core schema
  • Part 2 is OpenFormula (spreadsheet formulas)
  • Part 3 defines the packaging model of ODF, and went out for public review back in November

Part 1 is by far the largest of the 3 parts, at 838 pages.  Here is a high-level view of what is covered:

  1. Introduction
  2. Scope
  3. Document Structure
  4. Metadata
  5. Text Content
  6. Paragraph Elements Content
  7. Text Fields
  8. Text Indexes
  9. Tables
  10. Graphic Content
  11. Chart Content
  12. Database Front-end Document Content
  13. Form Content
  14. Common Content
  15. SMIL Animations
  16. Styles
  17. Formatting Elements
  18. Datatypes
  19. General Attributes
  20. Formatting Attributes
  21. Document Processing
  22. Conformance
  23. Appendix A.  OpenDocument Relax NG Schema
  24. Appendix B.  OpenDocument Metadata Manifest Ontology
  25. Appendix C.  MIME Types and File Name Extensions (Non Normative)
  26. Appendix E.  Recommend Usage of SMIL
  27. Appendix G.  Acknowledgments (Non Normative)

If any of this interests you I’d encourage you to take a look at the draft and submit comments per the process defined in the public review announcement.  I expect few will review the entire specification, but even if you can review only a chapter of particular interest to you, or even do a random page review, that will help.  We’re looking for any reasonable feedback, from typographical errors, to ambiguities to new feature proposals.  It is all good.

You can follow the incoming comments via the TC’s comment list, or unofficially via the ODFJIRA Twitter feed.

Now, I know that a vigorous public review, with many reviewers and many comments, is seen in some quarters as inconvenient and troublesome.  It is thought better (in those circles) for standards to sail by, unread, unchallenged and unimplemented.  I do not subscribe to that view.  I ask you to not be gentle on the ODF 1.2 public review draft.  Send us a lot of comments, so we know where we need to improve.  Send us a lot of defect reports, so we know what to fix.  Send us a lot of feature proposals, so we know what to do next.  Short of joining the ODF TC directly, this is the best opportunity to give us feedback.

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Filed Under: ODF Tagged With: OASIS, OpenFormula, XML

The Challenge

2008/05/05 By Rob 17 Comments

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<office:document-content
xmlns:office="urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:office:1.0"
xmlns:text="urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:text:1.0"
office:version="1.0">
<office:body>
<office:text>
<text:p>Dear Alex Brown. Please prove that I am invalid ODF 1.0 (ISO 26300:2006).
I do not think that I am. In fact I think that your statement that there are
no valid ISO ODF documents in the world, and that there cannot be, is a brash,
irresponsible and indefensible piece of bombast that you should retract.</text:p>
<text:p>(Please note that this document contains no ID, IDREF or IDREFS attributes.
Nor does it contain custom content.)</text:p>
</office:text>
</office:body>
</office:document-content>
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Filed Under: ODF Tagged With: Alex Brown, ISO/IEC 26300, ODF, OpenDocument Format, XML

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