On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 5:07 AM, Ian Lynch <[email protected]> wrote: > There has been a proposal to try and get ODF recognised as an official > extension of HTML5. On the face of it it sounds a good idea but I > don't know enough about the details or whether this is already in > progress. I guess it would require discussion with W3C, OASIS, and > probably TDF and ASF as a minimum. A logical technical need could be > to develop ODF rendering and editing in web browsers. To start with > this might simply be a limited subset of what can be achieved in > OO/LibO. > --
I know of a few discussions in this area, to see if there is sufficient interest, but there is no official standardization effort in this area. The main motivator is the emergence of a new class of editors, the web based editors. They tend to be flow-oriented, WYSIWYG editors that focus on a subset of the desktop editing experience. What is the best way to ensure interoperability across these editors, and with traditional desktop editors? Using ODF as-is, is one possibility, it is not really optimized for that use. For example, the web, with CSS, has a very different view of how style hierarchies are defined. And ODF, with an attribute vocabulary based on XSL:FO, has an unclear mapping to CSS. So one option discussed is to subset ODF to create a web profile. Other ideas discussed include defining a canonical mapping between that subset and HTML/CSS. Other ideas are defining an "ODF model" that can be expressed directly in a JSON encoding, for easier consumption by client-side HTML apps. Again, nothing official yet, just some explorations. One that is clear is that the question of formats and desire to avoid vendor lock-in does not just go away because we have web editors. Although we don't see the documents and do not store them on disk in a visible form, the documents are stored in an encoded form, and where that encoded form is defined by an open standard there are some advantages over a stored format that is proprietary. >From the perspective of AOOo, since we don't have web editors, I'd look at it from another angle. Now that we have the code under a permissive license, maybe we want to think of working toward a componetized version of AOOo that could some day be integrated into Firefox? That is a more direct way of getting ODF viewing and editing support into the browser. Alternatively, get a higher profile plugin for Firefox and other browsers to enable this support. -Rob > Ian > > Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications (The Schools ITQ) > > www.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940 > > The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, > Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and > Wales. >
