Plan-B for Software Documentation

Rick Jelliffe, from O’Reilley, writes today about “Comparing XML office document formats: using XML Metrics”.

He used a large document, the ODF 1.0 specification, (~735 pages) with tables and images and converted it into various formats for OpenDocument Format (ODF) using OpenOffice.org 2.0 and MS Office Open XML (MSOOXML) using MS Office 2007 beta. Then he used tools to measure the XML complexity with various metrics. This makes an interesting read for people who are interested in the debate of the two office document formats or are simply interested in the value of XML metrics.

Rick concludes:

The numbers seem to support the interpretation that beta MSOOX may be quite a bit less complex than ODF 1.1 at this stage, at least in the sense of using fixed structures more, and simpler in these sense of using fewer elements and attributes. ODF is flatter and has smaller filesize but seems to include more style headers than the MOOX does. The metrics indicate that the use of attributes may be significantly different between the two formats, for example for people looking at data conversion estimation. On the application level, Open Office loads the ODT file much faster than the Word 2007 beta loads the DOCX file.

A quick warning. Rick admittedly compares against a beta version of MS Office 2007. He states that “it seems possible that the Word 2007 beta saves a lot of information in bin64 encoded form that ODF exposes as attribute values.” and that this might be of temporary nature “while the thing [MS Office 2007 and the MSOOOXML] is under development.”

In any case a story I’ll follow up with.

Erwin Tenhumberg writes about “Alfresco’s ODF Virtual File System“. This is part of the Open Source Alfresco Content Management system.

This virtual file system offers a drive in Microsoft Windows that if you drop a file, it will add it to the content management system and also convert it automatically to ODF.

This is the power of open standards at work!

Techworld writes “The Spanish region of Extremadura has gone open source, deciding to move its entire administration to Linux and open source software within a year.”

The region of Extramandura decided in 2002 not to upgrade its school computers with the latest Microsoft version. Instead they moved to a Spanish Linux distribution based on Debian. This saved the poorest region of Spain a chunk of money (70,000 desktops with Linux and OpenOffice.org as productivity suite).

Now the administration has decided to do the same for their IT needs. They stress that the freedom represented by OpenOffice and OpenDocument Format (ODF) are vital to their decision. “Vázquez de Miguel said the move was expected to make Extremadura’s government less exposed to forced upgrades, and would make public documents easier to preserve and more easily accessible by the public.”

One can only conclude they were satisfied with the functionality and the total cost of ownership.

There is a new ODFReader for Firefox available. This Firefox extension does read ODF text documents and is being developed by the OpenDocument Fellowship. The ODFReader is a companion of the ODFViewer, using the same XSLT style sheet to convert XML into (X)HTML.

Currently the ODFReader for Firefox does support Firefox 1.5.0.X and claims to be Firefox 2.0 ready.

The OpenDocument Fellowship announced today the availability of an ODF Viewer.

This small application allows to view ODF documents even if no office suite supporting ODF is installed. For example, with this tool you can read ODF e-mail attachments or ODF documents download from the Internet without having installed OpenOffice.org or one of the other suites supporting ODF.

The application is currently in beta testing and does not yet support ODF 1.0 fully. I’d expect frequent updates. It is probably best recommended for power users or environments where it can be installed and updated by an IT department.

The ODF viewer is based on a XSLT style-sheet to transform XML to (X)HTML. The transformation infrastructure and the user interface are based on XUL and XULRunner.

Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has found the Open Document Format to be compatible with free software licensing, such as the General Public License (GPL) and the Apache License. SFLC wrote an “OpenDocument Opinion Letter” on behalf of the Apache Software Foundation and and the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The letter is signed by the SFLC’s legal council, Eben Mogley. The opinion concludes with the following findings.

1. Under the relevant OASIS patent policy, all Essential Claims held by OASIS Technical Committee Obligated Members are available to all implementors of ODF on terms compatible with free and open source software licenses.
2. Sun’s license terms for access to its Essential Claims are fully compatible with free and open source software licensing.
   • Sun’s terms are compatible with contribution and licensing under the policies and license of the Apache Software Foundation.
   • Sun’s terms are not in conflict with Section 7 of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License, and are not otherwise incompatible with the GPL.

This means that “Free Open Source Projects” can use the format. We can expect more OSS development teams to adopt the format and see more applications supporting it or like the Plone foundation using it in some other way. This is also another confirmation supporting the State of Massachusetts’ decision to use it for longterm storage.

Eike Rathke reports that IANA registered officially the MIME-types for OpenDocumentFormat

• vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.image
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.image-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.text
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-master
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-web

Time to update Firefox and Apache HTTP server, so they can interpret ODF documents and the new ISO/IEC 26300 document mime-types correctly.

In a joint press release, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has approved the international Standard ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0.

The Open Document Format (ODF) has been developed as an application-independent format by a vendor-neutral OASIS Technical Committee. ODF has been at the heart of the controversy around the State of Massachusetts adopting open standards to ensure long-term readability of electronic documents.