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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:

TC creates one or more Working Drafts
A Working Draft may then additionally be approved as a Committee Draft
A Committee Draft may then be additionally approved as a Public Review Draft
After addressing received public comments, a Committee Draft may be approved as a Committee Specification
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:

Introduction
Scope
Document Structure
Metadata
Text Content
Paragraph Elements Content
Text Fields
Text Indexes
Tables
Graphic Content
Chart Content
Database Front-end Document Content
Form Content
Common Content
SMIL Animations
Styles
Formatting Elements
Datatypes
General Attributes
Formatting Attributes
Document Processing
Conformance
Appendix A. OpenDocument Relax NG Schema
Appendix B. OpenDocument Metadata Manifest Ontology
Appendix C. MIME Types and File Name Extensions (Non Normative)
Appendix E. Recommend Usage of SMIL
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.

<?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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ODF 1.2 Part 1 Public Review

The Challenge