Update from the ODF Technical Committee

While waiting for the official publication of ODF (OpenDocument) 1.3 as an OASIS Standard, after the approval of the ODF Technical Committee Draft at the end of April 2021, there are a few news updates from the ODF TC which are worth some publicity.

Since 2020, the ODF TC has two co-chairs – Patrick Durusau and Svante Schubert – and four co-editors: Francis Cave, Patrick Durusau, Svante Schubert and Michael Stahl. In the past, there were only two editors, and having doubled the number provides more bandwidth and flexibility.

The ODF TC has recently updated the project charter after more than a decade. The updated document is available on this page. The most important news is the commitment to deliver a Committee Specification Draft at least every year in December, consisting of RelaxNG schemas and written specifications, to avoid a long delay between two consecutive versions of the standard as in the recent past.

The ODF TC also aims to provide a fast-track for new ODF features of implementers, and publish the basic description (OASIS Committee Specification) more frequently, so features can be quickly  reviewed and embraced into an ODF Specification without the need to use the intermediate LibreOffice External namespaces (lo-ext), with all the associated delays and costs.

In addition, Michael Stahl and Svante Schubert have collected all the technical tooling required for the publishing of the ODF specification and the specification artefacts into an OASIS Github repository: https://github.com/oasis-tcs/odf-tc. The aim is to be able to deliver all specification deliverables by automation from command line, to become more agile, and improve transparency and quality by adopting modern toolings.

Last, but not least, the ODF TC is considering an ODF Plugfest in 2022.

Learn more about the OpenDocument Format here.