The Future of Documents

After the ODF-OOXML was, here comes another potential Format War – this time for e-Books: “Format War Clouds E-Book Horizon“, titles the Wall Street Journal.

Most major e-book stores have used  proprietary formats, but Sony’s recent move towards ePub might change the game. Although its devices (and others, e.g. the iLiad)  have supported the format for a long time, Sony Store e-books were offered in their proprietary format until now.

However, Sony will still be using DRM – using Adobe’s Content 4 proprietary solution. Which might run against Amazon’s own standard, if it gains traction. So much for a real open “standard”.

Kindle Review has its own interesting view about this article – stating that this format war might be a bit “overhyped”. They cite a survey where format concerns were only a very secondary issue.  format extremely important, and 25% consider it important.

However, I feel their viewpoint might be a bit Kindle-centric this time (maybe because Kindle is not in Europe yet!).   Portability and interchange, as we’ve learnt the hard way for Office Documents, are very important – and need to be established as soon as possible. In fact, their own poll indicates their reader tend to agree – 35% of respondents believe an open format is extremely important, and 25% consider it important.

 The broader question (or problem) might be DRM for e-books – a standard format is worthless if DRM blocks it. Why not abandon them altogether, like the music industry did?

A year or so after the dispute between ODF and OOXML seemed to be settled, the situation is getting more and more confused.

OOXML was fast-tracked as an ISO standard in April 2008 through a questionable procedure, but a few months later Microsoft admitted that “ODF had clearly won” the Document Format Standard war, almost a year ago. However, Microsoft increased its participation in ODF Standards bodies participation, to the point that some open source advocates feared they might take control over the ODF Standards.

After a number of other episodes, the strategy delivers - Microsoft’s OOXML standard implementation is back on the list of recommended formats for government organizations, including France’s RGI (Référentiel général d’interopérabilité). Open Source advocates argue that a second Document Format is useless since ODF has been around for a few years now, and that even Microsoft products do not support the OOXML ISO implementation yet (support for the ISO version of OOXML Microsoft Office in Microsoft Office version is slated for next year). Microsoft counters that OOXML is not their software anymore, since anyone can implement OOXML compliance (after reading the 6000 pages spec of course).

And us, document users, are sitting in the middle, worried that we might not have a single, universal open document format after all, which was the whole point in that ODF-OOXML decision…

If you’ve been reading my blog in the past or attended one of my presentations, you remember that I strongly believe in XML as the future of documents to bring structure, interoperability, and openness.

This is essential to allow the dissemination of documents, and their content. Since late 2007, we have one open XML-based format to represent the layout of documents: Open Document Format (ODF). But ODF only represents layout and “logical” information. The next frontier is the markup of the document ”content” or semantic information in those documents for specific verticals. A number of formats are appearing, including XBRL (Extensible Business Markup Language) and Health Level 7 (HL7).

On that topic, this great blog post by Kurt Cagle on the O’Reilly Community uses the SEC announcement that companies over $5 billion in assets would be required to start reporting their earning using XBRL to document the need for such XML-based standards. XBRL, like other similar formats, turns your documents from plain, unstructured containers of information, into highly structured, queriable containers of data - thus facilitating greatly the extraction of their content.

Although the author notes that achieving transparency in the financial domain will be harder than just imposing XBRL as a standard, he states:

 ”it is very likely that 2009 will be a banner year for XML technologies in general, as two of the key issues that are highly visible this year – financial transparency within corporations and the streamlining of health care, both involve rich XML standards – XBRL for financial reporting, HL7 v3 for electronic health records.”

I couldn’t agree more - let’s hope XBRL and HL7 pave the way to a wide spectrum of XML-based formats for the semantic representation of the data which is required for any business process.

I thought ODF was the winner of the battle for XML office document format representation? Maybe not just yet…

Microsoft launched the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) a while back. DII is a working group between Microsoft, Novell and a few others, which aims at increasing the interoperability between OOXML and OpenDocument Format.

Microsoft announced last Wednesday a few results of this initiative. This included a Firefox plug-in for viewing OOXML documents within the popular browser (including on Linux),  a new version of its “translator” software which allows more faithful conversions into ODF 1.1, and POI, a new Java SDK developed by the Apache Software Foundation to manipulate OOXML documents.

Interesting news when OOXML was considered as somewhat moribund, which caught a few of the OpenOffice advocates off-guard. These announcements compensate a few of the gaps Office and OOXML had against OpenOffice and ODF – one of them was that OpenOffice 3.0 was the only solution to simply view “competing” format documents without expensive licenses (Office 2007).

Thought we were all set, with Open Document Format (ODF) being the standard for Future of Office Document formats? The war might not be over just yet.The OOXML fast-track through ECMA is still having some ripple effects.

 A few days ago, IBM announced that it would reconsider its membership in the hundreds of open bodies that create global standards - namely ISO. This is a direct consequence of Microsoft’s Open XML standardization, which IBM judged unethical. IBM claims that OOXML was only accepted because it was fast-tracked, and  through political pressure.

“Common, open and consensus-based technology standards from reputable standards bodies help ensure that each of us can easily purchase and interchangeably use computing technology from multiple vendors,” said Bob Sutor, IBM vice president of open source and standards. “The ways in which they are created and adopted provide reasonable assurances that disparate products will work with one another, and withstand the test of time.”

In the last few weeks, a number of flags have been raised as to whether the ODF standard (which Microsoft admitted had won against OOXML) could actually be taken over by Microsoft. Indeed, it seems that over half of the active participants of SC 34 are actually directly employed or strongly related to Microsoft.

I am still hoping this could be good news for the Future of Documents by getting ODF convergence and ’synchronized maintenance’ with OOXML. But I have to admit I have to agree with the many that see this as a risk of ODF being mostly controlled by Microsoft and taken into directions that might not be in line with its original spirit…