Office Doc Format News

A couple of low-key news items in the Office Document XML space, worth highlighting because I think this area is significant, as do some important people. First off, the people standardizing this stuff over at OASIS (and soon, ISO) published a second draft, and, without any fanfare, they changed the name from “OpenOffice.org XML Format” to “OpenDocument”, which is shorter, better, and not tied to any particular implementation. There’s action on the Microsoft front too; check the microsoft.public.office.xml and microsoft.public.xml newsgroups, where there are flurries of questions digging through the knotty corners of WordML and ExcelML; you never really understand a dialect until you have to write a program to generate it. I’m sure the details will come out despite some current irritation, but this is a reason why Microsoft should cast a friendly eye at the boring, bureaucratic, painful standardization process.