IT TRENDS
‘Open up’ that document
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Document software giants fight over file formats, the right to be known as a ‘standard.’ What is at stake for lay users?
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Manipulation: It is important that existing document formats are forcibly tweaked so that they talk to each other.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the ‘openest’ of all?”
No, they are not reciting variations on a nursery rhyme theme in Geneva, this week. But they might as well be doing that. On September 2, at its international headquarters, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) will count the votes cast by its 123 member nations ( including India) on whether to accord to a file format for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, created by Microsoft, the status of an ‘open standard.’
Popular choice
It is known as Office Open Extensible Markup Language or OOXML (pronounced “oh oh XML”) and it is the default format for the latest — 2007 — version of the Microsoft Office suite and hence the format of choice, for all MS products in the future. (Compatibility packs are required to ‘talk’ to earlier versions of ‘MS Office.’) Microsoft has been pushing to get the ISO stamp on its standard and the September vote is a fallout of its application.
Already ratified
ISO has already ratified one document standard: In May 2006, it released ‘ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications ( OpenDocument) v. 1.0’ — stamping a document standard created by OpenOffice, the office suite placed in the public domain by Sun Microsystems and adopted as a standard by OASIS — the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards.
The format was supported by Sun’s commercial edition of the office suite version, StarOffice as well as by the Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF), the widely used format created by Adobe Systems, for sending documents by e-mail. While Microsoft did not support ODF, it announced that future versions of its Office suite will be able to save documents as PDF files which meant indirectly recognising the ODF format.
In recent weeks, the global technology media has given to Microsoft’s ISO application, the character of a gladiatorial contest between two heavy teams.
On one side, the software giant whose Windows operating system and Office suite straddle the computing world, with a presence on nine out of ten PCs. On the other side, a loose consortium of companies including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, Oracle and Google, who have been reciting the ‘open’ mantra.
Score sheets have been maintained as yet another nation announced its intention to vote ‘aye’ or ‘nay’ on September 2. India’s representative at the ISO, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) was reported last week, to have decided not to support the Microsoft application, but apparently the door has been left open ( typically!) for a last minute change of heart.
Cornered by media
Leading technology players and institutions have been cornered by the media, to take a stance. Both sides in this country have ‘let slip the dogs of war’ and flashed favourable quotes from their adherents.
There were hardly any surprises: This is the heaven of outsourcing and Indian IT players generally played safe and ‘voted’ with their biggest clients abroad.
Those whose client base straddles the ‘document divide,’ said (in effect) “the more, the merrier, let multiple document standards bloom.”
So what does this mean for the lay user? A truly ‘open’ document standard is in everyone’s interest. It means, I can read a document you have sent me without having to check whether my PC runs the same word processor or spread sheet or presentation tool that you have used to create it.
It means such a document standard is ‘extensible’ — any one can improve it or create a better product without having to pay anyone money — as long as one shares one’s work in an ego-less fashion and adheres to the core requirements of the standard.
Clearly, this condition does not prevail very widely today — so what have emerged are ‘de facto’ standards.
Adobe Acrobat PDF is a de facto standard — possibly the most widely used format to save and send a document with the assurance that the recipient will get to see it exactly the way you wrote it.
Adobe cannily made the Acrobat Reader a free giveaway, while selling the software that allows you to create a PDF document. But one has to pay the price of popularity: A casual Net search will throw up dozens of free downloadable tools that promise to help you save documents as PDFs.
Sheer ubiquity
The various formats of Microsoft’s Office suite — .doc for Word documents, .ppt for PowerPoint etc — are for all practical purposes, de facto standards — by virtue of their sheer ubiquity.
You have to create a presentation and mail it to customers in half a dozen countries? You create it in PowerPoint. Any thing else is to live dangerously, to risk that a crucial recipient might not have the right ‘filter’ to run your presentation on his or her native Office suite.
Since it was ratified last year, the ODF standard has been adopted by Google in its new Web-based suite of office tools, Google Apps.
This saw a significant upward jump in the graph of ODF documents exchange. All Linux flavours without exception, as well as ‘Open’ browsers like Mozilla and Firefox, have favoured ODF, and most have offered OpenOffice as the default office application.
But when did YOU last receive an email with an attached document in one of the ODF formats (.odt for word processing, .ods for spreadsheets, .odp for presentation, .odg for graphics, .odf for formulae)? They sound unfamiliar? As Americans say “likewise.”
It is good that the information technology world is groping towards a universal standard so that documents can be exchanged on the Internet, systematically, seamlessly, swiftly.
But in the less idealogically coloured perspective of the rest of us, it is more important that existing document formats are forcibly tweaked so that they talk to each other because clearly, whichever way the wind blows down Lake Geneva on Sunday next, none of today’s multiple standards are going to roll over and die.
Microsoft’s getting ISO approval for OOXML may be important for Microsoft and its corporate partners.
For us the only question at this point of time is: Will what we create, be read and seen by those who need to read and see it the way we intended it, ten times out of ten? As long as the answer remains ‘no,’ all we can say is, “back to the drafting board, guys, your document format is not up to standard!”
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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