Comparing CDF and ODF
Gary Edwards describes his plans for using CDF in place of ODF.
The simple truth is that ODf was not designed to be compatible – interoperable with existing Microsoft documents, applications and processes. Nor was it designed for grand convergence… CDF on the other hand was designed exactly for grand convergence.
Now let’s compare this statement against the Compound Document Use Cases and Requirements document:
The Open Document Format … specifies an office application compatible style model, page layouts, index generations, text fields, table formulas which the CDF specifications will not address.
It’s not clear how one squares these two statements.
My prediction: if they even ship a solution that comes close to matching their lofty marketing rhetoric (doubtful), it will need to rely on non-standard extensions. If they try to standardize any of those extensions within the CDF group at the W3C, they will be rejected as out of scope.
Perhaps at that point we’ll hear noise about how the W3C is dominated by big vendors that are hostile to real-world interoperability and that CDF was never designed to meet market requirements.
