A lot of misinformation about the OpenDocument digital format has started to appear in the mainstream media and interest groups. Answers to many questions on the topic already have appeared, but they are written by techies for techies. This article is different, however. You can print out this one and pass it on to everyone, regardless of their computer skill level.
Thank you for the article! This is quite helpful when explaining it to my co-workers.
It’s hard to print if you don’t have access do the article.
It’s hard to print if you don’t have access do the article.
Agreed.
That said, I like Linux Journal — it’s the one dead tree pub I spend money on every month or two. They not only do a good job covering Linux and OSS, they put out a good magazine while most of the others are just dreck.
Wow, what a great article!
“Access denied
You are not authorized to access this page.”
Very insightfull. I really didn’t expect such an entry on OSNews.
Very open indeed, that document.
“Very insightfull. I really didn’t expect such an entry on OSNews.”
It’s a problem on their end. It works fine here. In a comment on the article it is said you have to click “add comment” to read the article.
I do not have any problem accessing http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8616
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8616
I don’t see much worth reading in this article.
The Mars data thing mentioned in the beginning, could have been prevented if there had been A standard that they followed. Open standard or closed standard doesn’t matter, as long as there is A standard.
The rest of the article is pretty much not worth reading at all.
What a lot of people needs to learn is that it doesn’t matter if a standard is open or proprietary, as long as there IS a standard. A standard that is strictly followed by everyone who use it (freely or through license).
Many document formats (including Word .doc’s from various versions of Office, WordPerfect, etc.) may not have been standardized in the past, but this is changing all over the spectrum of word processors and other programs.
OpenDocument just happens to be one of these formats, which also happens to be “open” and “free”. But as is often the case, one size does NOT fit all (which some people seems to think) and thanks to that fact, other formats will continue to be widely used, likely more used than OpenDocument.
In the end, all users win on this, regardless of if the format they have to work with is “open” or “closed” or “free”.
You claim it is not important whether the standard is open or proprietary.
What happens when I have 50 GB of sciencetific research stored in a closed format and the company decides to charge $200 per license for their software that only runs on their custom OS that costs $1000 per license.
I’ll tell you–I’m up the river without a paddle.
Granted, this is an exaggeration but that is the sort of thing open standards protect against. How difficult is it to see that if one company controls a patent-encumbered standard then all of our data stored in that format is held hostage?
Open standard or closed standard doesn’t matter, as long as there is A standard.
This is little more than FUD – there can be no such thing as a closed standard. If a standard is not openly specified it is not a standard since how can anyone know if they are implementing the standard. This is why .doc is not and can never be a standard.
A standard may be free or non-free, a non-free standard is patent encumbered and may require royalties an and other restrictions to implement. The OpenDocument formats are both open and free.
“What a lot of people needs to learn is that it doesn’t matter if a standard is open or proprietary, as long as there IS a standard. A standard that is strictly followed by everyone who use it (freely or through license).”
That just goes to show that you still don’t understand it. You just keep your head in the sand and perhaps it might go away.
Nobody ever expects Microsoft zealots to understand anything outside their world.
OMG when did we get Peru!? Man, I need to stay more on top of these sort of things.
Note to self: Less OSNews.com, more http://www.soverign-nations-get-annexed-by-us.com
I was hoping this article would say stuff like:
Open document already has support for all these cool features:
– the
– bulleted
– list
– of user
– scenario
– based
– features
– (ex: encrypted sections [as opposed to the whole file], 3D styles and shadows, printer devmode descriptions and their non Windows equivalents [printers are very tricky beasts, printing is not as simple as sending the screen output to the printer, and some documents are targeted to be printed on a very specific printer])
The article makes a good point about the necessity of long term data storage with retrieval capability, but I’m not sure why that can’t just be accomplished by using any XML based storage format. I mean, isn’t XML ‘self describing’ to some extent? The problem NASA had is that they had binary data that couldn’t be visually interpreted by human beings. I’m not suggesting that viewing an XML file in a text editor makes the information it contains immediately apparent, but I do believe it is quite a lot easier to write an application to suck up that XML and display it in some meaningful fashion than to reverse-engineer binary format documents.
Can someone tell me: what qualifies as a ‘document’ in the Open Document sense (excepting the obvious)?
Web pages?
IDE project files?
Databases?
Graphics?
Also, how can it be guaranteed that applications will exist in perpetuity which read and write the current open document format? Why is it more likely that an application that reads and writes open document will continue to exist after other formats’ viewers/editors do not? As new document content metaphors come online, won’t open document need to be revved to support those new concepts? What if one of those new concepts is in conflict with the existing open document design? Is it really true that open document is perfectly designed, in such a way that it will never be necessary to change, and thus will enjoy application support throughout eternity in its current form?
The feature list is irrelevant–what is being stressed here is the importance of using an open standard. The standards committee can add needed features at any point in the future through an open process.
You’re right that one cannot be guaranteed that an application will always be around. That is not what is being said. The important thing being addressed here is that the *way* to read a file format is documented and can be implemented by anyone, anytime.
Open standards mean that there are no patents locking others out, no stipends raising the barrier of entry, and no guesswork required to unravel the case of the mystery file format.
Open standards benefit *every* user. It’s your data after all. Shouldn’t you have the capability to extract it from your computer at any time without having to rely on the goodwill of some corporation? Shouldn’t you have the means to retrieve the information that you have meticulously backed up for years, even if the progam you originally used to create it is not available for your current operating system?
Access to data is taken for granted by so many users all too often. The reality is that there is no reason in 2005 to continue being bound and controlled by closed standards. FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, Speex, Open Document, Jabber, SVG, PDF, PNG: Open standards are here–waiting to free users, to promote interoperability, to enable developers. All it takes is for us to *use* them.
An opendocument is only a compressed file containing some XML files and media content.The contents of any OpenDocument (.odt, odp etc.) is generally the following files –
mimetype – a file telling the MIME type of the document (application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation for and .odp (Presentation))
content – the XML content definitions etc.
styles – General Style description for the Document
meta – The meta data file (creator, language, etc.)
thumbnail – preview thumbnail image (probably the first page/first slide etc. – PNG Format)
settings – the configuration data for the file
manifest – The index of the compressed file’s content.
So it would not be difficult for any application to read the content by expanding the file and reading the information. I believe an application could display the contents, if it understands the contents of these files. The structure is standard. So there is nothing extraordinary required.
Keeping this in view, I believe the Web Browsers in future would be enriched to read OpenDocuments. This would put an end to requiring additional software to read content (and perhaps edit the documents [a dream]. There are limitations, but this is possible.