Where’s OpenDocument 1.2? (ODF)
Quite recently a few people have asked me where OASIS OpenDocument 1.2 is.
The official OpenDocument is ODF 1.1 which was approved as an OASIS standard in February 2007.
During the OOXML mess it was said that ODF 1.2 would be released in late 2007 but as that date grew closer people estimated “late 2008″, then “early 2009″, and yet today the development on ODF 1.2 continues. Because so many people have got it wrong in the past I’m hesitant to guess exactly when ODF 1.2 might come out of OASIS, but hey – I’ll live dangerously and do it anyway.
Within OASIS standards go through Working Draft, Committee Draft, Public Review Draft, Committee Specification, and finally they become an OASIS Standard. ODF 1.2 is currently in Committee Draft which is very far along, and no new features have been allowed since November last year. I follow the mailing list developments and some people might expect ODF 1.2 to be out mid-2010. OASIS seem to be taking the time to do it right, and a side-effect of this is to hopefully avoid any fuss when taking the standard to the ISO.
For ISO approval it needs to be finished by OASIS and then submitted via the ISO/IEC PAS process and this can take about another 6 months. PAS can be further delayed due to international defect reports and politics. The PAS process is quite distinct from the Fast-Track process as used by OOXML.
Like the HTML5 specification however stable parts of ODF 1.2 (such as the majority of OpenFormula) are being used already despite the lack of final accreditation by OASIS or ISO. OpenOffice 3.0 and later use the ODF 1.2 drafts, and have done since May last year.
So, I’m hoping that ODF 1.2 will be out mid-2010.
Tags: ODF
September 28th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Good post. Fortunately we’re a lot better at standards than we are with schedule estimation. I think the important piece to watch is the OASIS process, since that has the more stringent requirements. One of the requirements is that we have three successful implementations of the draft by OASIS members. So implementations must exist before we’re eligible to take the draft to an OASIS ballot. This is similar to the practice of many W3C working groups, which will delay the issue of a Recommendation pending implementation experience. But this is quite unlike Ecma, where OOXML was issued before there were any implementations and in fact we’re still waiting for Microsoft to implement OOXML a couple years later.
In any case, we’re not rushing ODF 1.2 to meet any artificially imposed deadline, nor are we neglecting to make progress with it. ODF 1.2 will be ready when it is ready. And until that day comes, I’m quite pleased with ODF 1.0 and ODF 1.1 adoption.