OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 and IS26300 Conformance…

As he promised last week, Alex Brown has gone ahead and tested an ODF file saved by OpenOffice 2.4.0 against the RelaxNG schema for IS26300, and as you would expect the test failed. (just like his test of Office 2007)

Clearly there is still work to be done.

Again, only tentative conclusions can be drawn from a smoke test (readers unfamiliar with this term as applied to software testing are recommended to read the Wikipedia article on it before grumbling about the depth of the test, please).

• For ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (ODF) in general, we can say that the standard itself has a defect which prevents any document claiming validity from being actually valid. Consequently, there are no XML documents in existence which are valid to ISO ODF.
• Even if the schema is fixed, we can see that OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 does not produce valid XML documents. This is to be expected and is a mirror-case of what was found for MS Office 2007: while MS Office has not caught up with the ISO standard, OpenOffice has rather bypassed it (it aims at its consortium standard, just as MS Office does).

Just like the Microsoft Office 2007 and IS29500 test that he did last week the results are not at all surprising, both Microsoft and the OpenOffice.org project have work to do before either suite produces ISO compliant document files in either IS26300 or IS29500 format.

It will be interesting to see if the press try to make the same drama out of this non-event as they did out of last weeks non-event.

If you are wanting to read more on the topic then Jesper Lund Stocholm has some details of his own testing posted here, and Doug Mahugh has some additional commentary that you will find here.