The Future of Documents

I’ve been talking quite a bit about the two XML standards competing as representation of all “office” application documents (e.g. spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing standards) in the future. And, if you followed this summer’s episodes, the hope is that the industry converges on one single format, so that documents really become interchangeable, without the need for converters.

Well, did you know that China has developed a similar standard for its national use, called UOF (Uniform Office Format) ?

This standard has been around for a few years, since the working group was created in 2002, and its first draft was produced in December 2005. It has since been adopted as Chinese National Standard.

This standard seems to be well advanced, and provides bidirectional converters to ODF (supporting only the major functionalities - an estimation is that 80% of the functions captured in documents could be retained after conversion, 60% of those very easily). Although it would not be easy, the possibility of merging UOF and ODF has been discussed officially by the China State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and Sun’s Scott Mc Nealy at the 2007 “WTO IPR Issues in Standardization”.

As for OOXML, although converters would be almost as efficient, they are lagging behind, and there is no discussion of merging the two standards.

The Standards Blog has a few very interesting articles on the topic, and links to a few presentations. Also very interesting is the analysis that China might not want to push too far the merger with existing, “First World” standards. Indeed, according to that blog, ”[...]there is a global standard setting infrastructure that is dominated primarily by the western, developed countries that created it, and that own most of the patents that are infringed by the standards created within that infrastructure.  China is only now beginning to actively participate in that infrastructure, and suffers from a historical imbalance in patent ownership. 

The result is that there are many standards that cannot be implemented, for all practical purposes, in products that are privately branded in China.  As a result, while China can manufacturer many ICT products (such as DVD players and wireless telephones) on order for western companies that own the patents, it cannot afford to manufacturer and sell them itself, due to the high royalties that Chinese manufacturers would be required to pay.”

China will therefore most likely prefer creating their own “home grown” standards that do not infringe foreign patents, but may be protected by their own patents…

In any event, given the size of China’s economy and population, certainly a standard worth being aware of - hopefully the merger with ODF will occur eventually, as having one open XML standard would be beneficial to us document users…