OASIS, ODF and PHP

Greg Rundlett

http://rundlett.com/s5/oasis.html

Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict

Free Standards and File Formats

What's in it for me?
  • A B C D E F G
What is a standard?
Something everybody uses. The alphabet is a standard.
Any patents? Any copyright? It is not proprietary. Who owns it? -- Everybody Do these facts stifle invention or competition? No Who benefits? -- Everybody

Why should I develop for the OpenDocument format?

Because OpenDocument is...

An ISO standard
The future
Truly open
Cross-platform
Stable
Versatile
Interoperable
Microsoft Office-compatible
Modular
Popular
A platform to build on
A level playing field

Because OpenDocument is...

  • An ISO standard. OpenDocument is now mandated in government by international treaties. [1] [2] The government is the single largest user of most products.
  • The future. The Gartner Group projects that ISO will not approve Microsoft's Open XML format and that OpenDocument adoption will expand rapidly as the favored solution for office document software interoperability. And as a result MS Office will decline in popularity.
  • Truly open. You won't hit artificial barriers imposed by your competitor or your supplier in order to maintain control of the file format. [3]
  • Cross-platform. Unlike Microsoft's Open XML formats, OpenDocument includes no dependencies on Microsoft Windows. It was designed as a true cross-platform file format specification.
  • Stable. Because it is an approved international standard and is required as a unaltered specification in many governmental roles, there are few opportunities for one of your competitors to apply unfair tactics such as embracing, extending, and extinguishing the standard.
  • Versatile. There are no dependencies on the features and APIs of any particular application or operating system. Your developed application can stand alone.
  • Interoperable. Your application's output can be used by any other ODF-aware application running on any operating system. Finally, the developer community has a truly interoperable rich formatting set of file formats for the creation of rich documents. You are not at the mercy of one of your competitors who will not have your best interests at heart.
  • Microsoft Office-compatible. Several tools are already available for converting between Open Document and Microsoft Office files. See for example the conversion tools category on our Applications page. Others are under development, including an Office Open XML-OpenDocument Translator plugin project for Office being sponsored by Microsoft. Several of these tools are already in production use.
  • Modular. Because there are no application or operating system dependencies, you can achieve greater modularity among multiple applications, either loosely coupled or within a suitable application framework.
  • Popular. Many developers are already staking out their first-mover advantage with OpenDocument support. See our applications page for a growing but non-comprehensive list of apps supporting ODF. Should you be left behind?
  • Easy to work with. ODF is XML, written with the goal of maximising ease of understanding. The specification is an easy to read Relax-NG schema, and it builds on existing standards that you may already be familiar with like XLink, MathML, SVG and XForms. When no existing candidate is available, it uses syntax inspired by XHTML. Quick, what does this do?
    <draw:image
                xlink:href="Pictures/1D67595BF2E.png"
                xlink:type="simple" xlink:show="embed"
                xlink:actuate="onLoad"/>

    What about this?

    <text:h text:style-name="Heading_2">
            Introduction to OpenDocument
            </text:h>
            <text:p text:style-name="Text_body">
            OpenDocument is the only ISO standard covering
            the needs of office applications. It can
            represent text documents, spread sheets, vector
            graphics, presentations and more. It reuses
            existing standards and puts them in one simple
            package.
            </text:p>
  • XML. ODF brings to document production the many advantages of XML:
    • It is inherently extensible. In addition, the OpenDocument specification specifically allows extensions. You can add features to the format to meet particular needs.
    • It can be manipulated by the myriad of standard XML parsers. XML has been in use for 20 years, and is a very mature technology.
    • It is easier to convert between XML formats than between binary ones. For example, we've made a Firefox extension to make it read ODF files. We did this by just converting ODF into HTML.
  • A platform to build on. ODF will be regularly updated and developers are free to seek needed enhancements through an open standardisation process that favours no vendor. ODF lets developers cooperate where it makes sense to do so.
  • A level playing field. Because of all the factors discussed above, ODF offers a level playing field. ODF developers can compete based on product utility, quality, and price. The ODF playing field is not tilted by being under the control of a company or consortium that can exclude competitors.

Footnotes

[1] Article VI of the Agreement on Government Procurement and Article II of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade.

[2] The E.C.'s IDABC, is an example of an implementing government body. Here is a good article that deals with OpenDocument and IDABC in context. NOTE: That article was written before OpenDocument became an ISO standard. Since then, many governments have announced they are moving to OpenDocument. See this site's government precedent page for the growing but non-comprehensive list.

[3] Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center has issued a formal legal opinion, concluding that "[o]n the factual basis described, and subject to reservations, it is our opinion that ODF, as standardized and licensed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information (OASIS), is free of legal encumbrances that would prevent its use in free and open source software, as distributed under licenses authored by Apache and the FSF."

Why should I develop for the OpenDocument format?

Because OpenDocument is...(continued)

  • XML
  • Easy to work with. Quick, what does this do?
    <draw:image
    xlink:href="Pictures/1D67595BF2E.png"
    xlink:type="simple" xlink:show="embed"
    xlink:actuate="onLoad"/>

    What about this?

    <text:h text:style-name="Heading_2">
    Introduction to OpenDocument
</text:h>
<text:p text:style-name="Text_body">
    OpenDocument is the only ISO standard covering the needs of office applications. It can
    represent text documents, spread sheets, vector graphics, presentations and more. It reuses
    existing standards and puts them in one simple package.
</text:p>

What Is OASIS?

Organization for the
Advancement of
Structured
Information
Standards

OASIS Mission

OASIS drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business standards.

OASIS Profile

OASIS Liaisons

OASIS cooperates with other standards & industry organizations to :
  • Reduce duplication, and promote interoperability
  • Gain sanction, authority and adoption for OASIS Standards
  • American Bar Association (ABA)
  • Asia Public Key Infrastructure (Asia PKI)
  • ASM International
  • Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD)
  • Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG)
  • CEFRIEL
  • ChangFeng Open Standards Platform Software Alliance
  • China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC)
  • Confederation of Forest Industries
  • Continental Automated Buildings Association (CABA)
  • Disaster Management interoperability Services
  • Electronic Commerce Promotion Council of Japan (eCom)
  • European Committee for Standardization/ Information Society Standardization System (CEN/ISSS)
  • GS1-US/RosettaNet
  • Health Level Seven (HL7)
  • European Information and Communication Technology Standards Board (ICTSB)
  • Institute for Supply Management (ISM)
  • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
  • International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation (IBFD)
  • International Digital Enterprise Alliance (IDEAlliance)
  • International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)
  • International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)
  • International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
  • International Standards Organization (ISO)
  • International Telecommunications Union (ITU)
  • IPsphere Forum
  • ISO / IEC Joint Technical Committee (JTC)
  • Korea Electronics & Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
  • Korea Institute for Electronic Commerce (KIEC)
  • Korea Integrated Forum on Electronic Commerce (ECIF)
  • Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency (KIPA)
  • Korea National Computerization Agency (KNCA)
  • Liberty Alliance
  • Localisation Industry Standard Association (LISA)
  • Localisation Research Centre (LRC)
  • LonMark International
  • Mortgage Bankers Association - Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MBAA-MISMO)
  • National Notary Association (NNA)
  • Object Management Group (OMG)
  • Open Applications Group (OAGi)
  • Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
  • Open Mobile Alliance (OMA)
  • Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE- PISCES)
  • Planning and Scheduling Language on XML Specification Consortium (PSLX)
  • PISCES Ltd.
  • Property Records Industry Association
  • Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques (SITA)
  • Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA)
  • Taiwan National Information Infrastructure Enterprise Promotion Association (NII-EPA)
  • United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitations and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT)
  • United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN-ECE )
  • Universal Postal Union (UPU)
  • Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-i)
  • Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC)
  • World Conservation Union (IUCN)
  • World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

What is ODF? (1/2)

What is ODF? (2/2)

What is ODF not?

OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications TC

Started:
Dec. 2002
Charter:
Develop an XML-based file format specification for office applications
Chair:
Michael Brauer, Sun Microsystems
Current status:
OpenDocument v1.1 approved as an OASIS Committee Specification in October 2006.

TC Members

Apache Configuration

# Regular documents.
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text         .odt
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet  .ods
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation .odp
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics     .odg
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart        .odc
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula      .odf
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.image        .odi

# Templates
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-template         .ott
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet-template  .ots
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation-template .otp
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics-template     .otg
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart-template        .otc
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula-template      .otf
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.image-template        .oti

# Master documents and HTML templates
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-master  .odm
AddType application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-web     .oth
Save to .htaccess in Document Root directory, or make it part of your apache.conf

ODF Application Support

Wiki: Mediawiki

Go to http://www.ipd.uni-karlsruhe.de/~hauma/odt2txt/ to try composing documents in OpenOffice, and then automatically translating them to wiki markup. This is accomplished by having certain styles defined in your OpenOffice document (see template), and by using XSLT on the XML data produced by OpenOffice. Details are also provided in this wiki page http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Odt2Wiki and this issue tracker: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=48409 The wiki page gives instructions on how to save the XSLT to your local OpenOffice installation so that you can use it as an 'export filter'. This approach allows you to author documents offline in OpenOffice and then export them to Mediawiki format for pasting into the browser edit window when you are online at Wikipedia.

Browser

What else is going on that I might not have heard about?

PHP Developer Resources

More Resources

Software and converters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_Software
Groklaw's Resource page
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20051216153153504
Other supporting software
(Lots of Validators and Accessibility checkers)
Viewer
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/odfviewer Firefox viewer too
Web-based
docs.google.com (available to Google accounts) is a browser-based document system offering support for ODF, so I wonder how they do it. http://www.google.com/support/writely/
Validator http://opendocumentfellowship.org/validator
PERL
OpenDocument Perl Module:
http://search.cpan.org/dist/OpenOffice-OODoc
http://ooolib.sourceforge.net/
ODF Grep C++ library
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odfgrep/

Other communities and sites

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
OpenOffice.org wiki
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page
The OpenDocument Fellowship
contains a listing of tools for developers (though none in PHP) http://opendocumentfellowship.org/resources/dev_tools
Aukyla Document Management System
http://www.aukyla.nl/?page=Products/ADMS Built in cooperation with the OpenDocument Fellowship http://www.aukyla.nl/?page=Products/Aukyla+Platform/Downloads and svn https://adms.auton.nl/svn/adms/ Documentation http://www.aukyla.nl/documentation/hierarchy.html

More OASIS Resources

Sites
opendocument.xml.org
Mailing Lists
office: the list used by TC members to conduct Committee work. TC membership required to post. TC members are automatically subscribed; the public may view archives.
office-comment: a public mail list for providing input to the OASIS office Technical Committee members. Send a comment or view archives.
opendocument-users: an unmoderated, public mail list that provides an open forum for developers to exchange ideas and information on implementing the office OASIS Standard. Subscribe or view archives.

Greg Rundlett

Free software in this presentation

Ubuntu, Quanta, S5, OpenOffice.org, KDiff3, Subversion, Firefox, KMail, Konsole, Kopete, Gaim, Gimp
Proprietary software and/or closed formats: none