OpenDocument Foundation drops support for ODF, backs obscure W3C format

By Ryan Paul | Published: October 31, 2007 - 10:40 CT

The OpenDocument Foundation has decided to end its support for OASIS's OpenDocument Format (ODF) and instead support W3C's Compound Document Format (CDF), which is currently described in the Web Integration Compound Document Core 1.0 draft. This move reflects growing concerns within the interoperability advocacy community about the long-term viability of both ODF and Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML).
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The OpenDocument Foundation is a little-known industry group that was originally founded to promote adoption of the ODF format. Its core members include OASIS ODF technical committee member Gary Edwards, OpenOffice.org marketing lead Sam Hiser, and Paul Martin—a Groklaw writer and legal expert better known as Marbux. The OpenDocument Foundation's most significant contribution to ODF advocacy efforts is an ODF plugin for Microsoft Office that includes support for legacy versions all the way back to Office 97.

The group no longer feels that ODF is sufficiently open or flexible enough to best serve the needs of office software users. Instead, it's advocating the W3C's Compound Data Format. The CDF (not to be confused with NASA's Common Data Format, which has the same acronym) is intended to support integrated use of multiple markup languages and seems primarily based on on the use of XHTML and SVG. According to the OpenDocument Foundation, the CDF offers several advantages over ODF, including less risk of intellectual property encumberment, greater flexibility, and broader use of existing standards.

The OpenDocument Foundation notes (PDF) that Sun holds critical patents relating to the OpenDocument format and has retained the right to countersue for infringement if sued over related technologies. The OpenDocument Foundation feels that this unduly advantages Sun and offers ODF nothing but excessive intellectual property burdens. OOXML suffers from the same problem, according to the foundation, which has accused Microsoft of misrepresenting the intellectual property implications of OOXML adoption. Lastly, the group is also concerned that both OOXML and ODF are not sufficiently open because they both "allow supersetting and their major implementations use undocumented proprietary extensions, creating interoperability break points."

Although the IP concerns are difficult to evaluate, the technical merits of CDF are relatively straightforward. The W3C formats that would be used with CDF documents are very well understood, and a vast multitude of tools and technologies already exists to read, render, manipulate, and generate content in those formats. The obvious downside is that existing W3C formats don't yet provide the full range of functionality needed for office documents. The other major problem with CDF is that there aren't really any widely-used implementations yet, whereas ODF and OOXML are both already used in office applications. Opera is currently working on a CDF implementation, but it is unclear what the scope of that implementation will be or when it will be available. The OpenDocument Foundation is attempting to redesign its own document interoperability plugin so that it can support CDF.

The contentious debate over document formats doesn't appear to be slowing down. All of the major formats are widely criticized by detractors and the companies with a major stake in open format adoption have taken to using increasingly aggressive and dishonest strategies to increase support for their technologies. The likely outcome is the status quo: market dominance by the format used in the most popular office software—instead of the format that provides the highest level of interoperability.