California Legislature Considers Open Document Standards

California assemblyman Mark Leno has introduced a bill that would require the state government to use open and XML-based standards for electronic documents. The bill states: "Beginning on or after January 1, 2008, all documents, including, but not limited to, text, spreadsheets, and presentations, produced by any state agency shall be created, exchanged, and preserved in an open extensible markup language-based, XML-based file format, as specified by the department."

In evaluating such standards for adoption by the state the following criteria are to be considered: "(1) Interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications. (2) Fully published and available royalty-free. (3) Implemented by multiple vendors. (4) Controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard."

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) would meet all the requirements and is probably the leading candidate for the proposed standard, as Massachusetts has enacted legislation for support of ODF, and similar bills are being debated in Minnesota and Texas. Read more...