From the «and thank $DEITY for it» department:
Title: Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme Author: Dan Robinson
Date: Sat, 03 May 2025 09:29:09 +0000
Link: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/05/03/20_years_open_document_format/

A look back at two decades of ODF, from open source hopes to patchy real-world adoption

It's been 20 years since the Open Document Format (ODF) became a standard, marking a milestone in the push for open, vendor-neutral file formats — and the
beginning of a long but largely unsuccessful attempt to loosen Microsoft Office's grip on the desktop.…

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On 03 May 2025 11:43:29 GMT, Retrograde wrote:

It's been 20 years since the Open Document Format (ODF) became a
standard, marking a milestone in the push for open, vendor-neutral file formats — and the beginning of a long but largely unsuccessful attempt
to loosen Microsoft Office's grip on the desktop.…

I still think it’s fared better as a standard than Microsoft’s OOXML (aka ISO 29500). Microsoft’s attempt to make its Office document formats an official standard ended up being a complete mess -- basically bulldozed
through various technical committees without due care and attention to the various glaring omissions and inconsistencies. Consider the “transitional” versus “strict” options, and notice that hardly anybody, even now, decades later, dares to use the “strict” version, because everybody is afraid to break compatibility with Microsoft Office.

ODF (ISO 26300) was and is a much cleaner and simpler spec by comparison,
and anybody implementing it knows they actually have a realistic chance of ending up with something workable.

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