There’s just been a link posted on an OpenOffice.org mailing list about some very interesting work going on to create a viewer for OpenDocument Format (ODF) documents. ODF is the new international standard (ISO 26300) for office documents – word processor documents, spreadsheets, etc. It was only a matter of time before someone started to put together a viewer for ODF files, and the folks at the OpenDocument Fellowship have a very early alpha version.

What makes this really interesting is that they are also working on a plug-in for the Firefox browser – the intelligent person’s alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. This is a truly dramatic development both for Firefox and for office software like OpenOffice.org which create ODF files.

Why? Because creating content for the web is a pain. Sorry, I know lots of people earn their living doing it, but it’s a pain. The current language of the web – HTML and CSS – is being pushed way beyond what it was originally designed to do.

Now let’s say you could go into OpenOffice.org and create a document in Writer, and immediately put it up on the web, in the knowledge that anyone viewing it in a browser would see exactly what you had created on your PC. That would be a huge leap forward. And as ODF is an open standard, this could be achieved without breaking the fundamental success factor behind the web – it’s built on open standards.

Interesting times indeed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 8:58 pm and is filed under OpenDocument. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.