The battle over office doc formats interests me a bit, and I was surprised to see ODF mentioned alongside OOXML as part of Apple's pitch for UNIX Certification in Leopard. Those really aren't exactly related, are they?

# UNIX Certification

Mac OS X is now a fully certified UNIX operating system, conforming to both the Single UNIX Specification (SUSv3) and POSIX 1003.1. Deploy Leopard in environments that demand full UNIX conformance and enjoy expanded support for open standards popular in the UNIX community such as the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) or ECMAโ€™s Office XML.


I've read a bit about Microsoft leaving the door open on closing the OOXML standard in the future, but haven't quite seen if that's the case with ODF as well. I've only just put my toe in the water here, though.

Massachusetts' attempt to swap from .doc and other, unpoliced formats to ODF does seem to have been ill-conceived. By saying that, I don't mean that Massachusetts' desire to escape vendor tie-in and to ensure that their public gov't docs would continue to be accessible in the future aren't absolutely essential goals for democratic governments. Rather, I'm not sure ODF was the right horse to back in the race. Is there a reason xhtml isn't better suited?