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.epub woes ahead because of OpenDocument Foundation problem with OCF?
October 31, 2007 | 12:35 am
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By David Rothman
“A group that was set up to promote the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) is abandoning its support of that file format in favor of a set of specifications developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).” – Computerworld.
More info: The OpenDocument Foundation is said to believes that W3C’s Compound Document Formats would be a better, more open choice, due to Sun Microsoft’s growing ties with Microsoft and the resultant effect on ODF development. Update: Not everyone likes the foundation’s new direction. Cerebus and some participants in a Slashdot discussion are suspicious about the foundation.
So what might be the impact on the IDPF, the e-book trade and standards group, which adopted ODF as a container format for .epub files? Any informed opinions on how easily the IDPF could bounce back from this? Or should the IDPF just ignore the change? Hachette Book Group USA is already gearing up to distribute e-books in .epub.
Important detail: The IDPF’s container format was intended to merge with the ODF Container in the near future.
Update, 6:21 a.m. : Peter Sorotokin at Adobe says the IDPF can move smoothly to the new arrangement.
Technorati Tags: IDPF , container format , Open Document Format , ODF , OCF , Compound Document Formats , CDF
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Comments:
It’s probably good news for epub which is already very much aligned with CDF! It’s likely that future replacement for ODF is going to be closely resembling epub. Epub already mandates support for compound documents (XHTML+SVG+CSS) as content flows in both CDR and CDI flavors. The most important thing in this area is that OPS 2.0 brought the first-class-citizen treatment of multi-namespace documents. This means that additional XML dialects are now easy to integrate. MathML would be a most natural future addition. The other two building blocks for CDF (SMIL and XForms) also can be cleanly integrated as well if support for interactivity and forms is desired in ebooks. In contrast, ODF came up with not-quite-W3C compatible formats for its content streams (text, graphics, etc.), which, looking back, was probably not a good idea (even though, IMHO, their formats and especially styling system were better than W3C’s, especially for use by the tools).
Peter, many thanks. As someone following the process from an Adobe perspective, how long do you think it’ll take for the IDPF, Adobe and other implementers to respond? Will this delay Hachette? David
The “OpenDocument Foundation” is three guys with a registered name playing on a bunch of gullible technology stenogr^H^H^Wreporters. They have *nothing whatsoever* to do with the OpenDocument Format *or* the ISO process standardizing it. Given the near-simultaneous statements from MS re: their piece-of-crap OOXML format, I smell a payoff.
There’s a thread a Slashdot that has more.
I don’t think that there is any need for IDPF response at all. Where epub and ODF differ, epub is more aligned with W3C anyway. And if Cerebus is right and OpenDocument Foundation is that shallow, this is not even a blip on the radar.
It is a bit troubling to me. Not so much that the od-foundation is changing their focus, but rather the reasons why they are doing so. Their main concern is interoperability: taking an open-document and doing some things on it with OpenOffice.org, then saving it and opening the same document in KOffice and doing other things on it and saving it, and having the document look and feel just the same.
They are also concerned with the incomplete paths in between open-documents and the various flavors of MicroSoft Word. CDF has apparently solved that problem, whereas Sun Microsystems, the owner of StarOffice, seems (according to od-foundation) more interested in seeing that their commercial implementation handles such conversions.
That said, the great thing about XML is that it should be easy enough, in future, to translate from one to another at least in terms of structure and content (though presentation might differ) and so epub could get along very well with both open-documents and cdf.
Important also to note that cdf is just a proposal at this stage, and that W3C takes generally just a couple years short of forever to finalize any of their standards. So open-document is here today and has tools to create and edit in it, but cdf is just in the planning stage. Something to keep an eye on in about 10 years.
I saw the posting on Slashdot about this and found the following comment very interesting. I don’t know how accurate this is, but if so, then this announcement is a non issue.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=344999&cid=21177871
pond,
Certainly I do not see how CDF “solved” Microsoft Office conversion problems. From my experience, ODF is much more aligned with the Office than CDF. And high-quality conversion will probably stay commercial for quite some time – work like that is very unexciting for someone to spend their spare time, so at least someone has to be paid good money for doing that.