In OpenDocument Foundation discussion, standards blogger gets skinny on CDF

Andrew Updegrove, an attorney who writes the Standards Blog, talked to representatives from the World Wide Web Consortium this week and found that the Compound Document Format (CDF) is not suitable for Office-style applications.

During the W3C's Technical Plenary Meeting earlier this week, Updegrove spoke to Chris Lilley, the go-to guy on CDF at the W3C. Lilley said the format was not designed for applications like spreadsheets and word processors and that CDF is meant for interoperability between other Web technologies.

The reason Updegrove inquired goes back to a news story, reported first here, and then discussed much on the Web. The article reported that members of the OpenDocument Foundation, an OpenDocument Format (ODF) advocacy group, have abandoned their work with ODF. Instead, they are now focusing on finding ways to convert documents between Microsoft Office Open XML and the CDF because of technical limitations with ODF, they said.

The fact that members of the OpenDocument Foundation have given up on the format was interpreted as a rift within the many people advocating for broader ODF adoption.

Updegrove, an ODF advocate himself, says they left for more than just technical reasons. Read the blog, published on Friday, for his explanation.