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ODF conformance tests

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Spring is in the air, and many a young man's thoughts turn to the matter of ODF compliance. Well, perhaps not many, but at least two ...

Jesper Lund Stocholm has posted the results of some tests that he participated in last fall, working with vendors including IBM, Microsoft and Novell to test interoperability of Open XML and ODF implementations. They used a set of sample documents provided by Danish public-sector organizations as the basis for the tests.

Jesper's findings are listed in the table to the right, and he concludes

So should we demand that OOo not be used at all? Of course not, but we should keep the pressure on the OOo-team to fix their code ... just as we should with Microsoft and Microsoft Office.

Alex Brown has also tested ODF conformance, with a slightly different approach. He took part 4 of the ECMA-376 spec, converted it to a DOC, then used OpenOffice 2.4.0 to convert the DOC to an ODT. His conclusions:

For ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (ODF) in general, we can say that the standard itself has a defect which prevents any document claiming validity from being actually valid. Consequently, there are no XML documents in existence which are valid to ISO ODF.
Even if the schema is fixed, we can see that OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 does not produce valid XML documents. This is to be expected and is a mirror-case of what was found for MS Office 2007: while MS Office has not caught up with the ISO standard, OpenOffice has rather bypassed it (it aims at its consortium standard, just as MS Office does).

After seeing these tests, I can't help wondering: what software will they use in South Africa to create ODF documents?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2008
    Thank you for pointing out that conformance weaknesses exist in ODF implementations as well.  Constructive criticism helps all parties, and should not be biased towards selected segments of the marketplace.   --restive

  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2008
    OpenOffice 2.4 seems to generate valid ODF 1.0 document.

  • Anonymous
    May 02, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 02, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 02, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    Library of Congress's standards activity. The Library of Congress has posted an overview of the work

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    it certainly wouldnt be word 2007! if i ever figure out where exactly in the "ribbon" the save document button is, i can guarantee you it won't support ODF!

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2008
    Actually OpenOffice 2.4 produces ODF v1.1 wich is actually not an ISO/IEC ratified version because it was never sumitted to ISO