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The UK government adopted use of the Open Document Format in 2014. While there are still some barriers to using that open standard, a lot of progress has been made.
The Open Standards team was asked 4 years ago by the Open Standards Board to help government publish documents in a more open, transparent and accessible way. We've since made progress in achieving these objectives but we still have more work to do.
This blog focuses on how far we've come in our mission to make Open Document Format (ODF) the default standard for editable documents. ODF is not intended to replace read-only documents like PDFs, so we have not included PDF usage in our statistics below.
[...] We cannot have important documents published in formats which do not meet open standards. Government documents are for everyone. Whether you're using Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, or any other system - you have the right to read what we have written and we will continue on our journey to make documents open and accessible.
From Technology at GDS : Open Document Format in government: an update
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ledow on Sunday April 29 2018, @09:40PM (2 children)
I'm British. In my job I have a lot of interactions with government portals and services, local and national, everything from civil servant pensions, to school intakes, to cyber-security documents.
I think it's safe to say that NOT ONCE have I seen anything in open-format. Unless you count CSV, which isn't so much "open" as just a data dump because it can contain nothing by lists of numbers or strings.
Open-formats only come into play when there is no existing format (e.g. the CTF - common transfer format - which informs government where school pupils go from and to when they change schools). Those tend to be virtually-undocumented pieces of XML, in general.
Sorry, but this is just a red herring. Nobody in the UK is using open formats any more than any other country. Certainly not when it comes to any service you've heard of, might need to use, or involves filling out format, etc.
There are reasons for that. Not one of them strong enough to justify any argument against literally codifying "You must use open formats". But there isn't a huge open-format, or open-source, push in UK government any more than anywhere else.
And I'd tend to notice, given that I work in IT, deal with government entities all the time, and am a massive open-source fan, advocate, user and contributor.
This is nothing more than spin, I'm afraid. Sure, I can find pages like: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/schedule-spreadsheet-to-claim-back-tax-on-gift-aid-donations [www.gov.uk] but there are the exception rather than the rule despite this recommendations going back pre-2015.
I was involved in beta-testing the new apprenticeships section of gov.uk only the year before last, as one of the first ever users of such. It was a complete redesign of the whole thing, from processes and procedures to the sections on the website to the back-end handling, and some of my suggestions were implemented as we were discussing them. Yet I still haven't seen or filled out an ODF or any other open-format file in any government process.
It's nice that it gets a mention, but I doubt there is any significant use of it whatsoever. And if Word, Excel, etc. didn't open ODF, etc. by default you can be damn sure it would be dead in the water.
My only question really is "Honestly, still using offline formats in this day and age?" There's no reason whatsoever that all these things couldn't be done live in a Google Docs / NextCloud/Owncloud manner without anyone ever having to install anything except a HTML5-compliant web browser. Then we wouldn't need a specific format (but it would be sensible to still include Download As... functionality). Fill out all that stuff, analyse it and play with it, online, on your government account, directly with auto-saving.
By the time we get any significant penetration for things like ODF, the format won't matter at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @01:30AM (1 child)
Why... I am one of those strange people who like to have my documents offline. For reading, writing and composing them, etc. I do not use google docs or OwnClowd or anything of the sort and I actually favour the idea of having dedicated software for different things instead of a one-size-fits-all web browser.
It is true that odf is not very popular. I actually use officeXP format for doc and xls files, for texts and spreadsheet and my family has learned as well to save in those formats. True, we do not generate anything complicated that the formats do not support, but also everyone in my home uses Linux Mint as that is what I have put at the computer.
All this had little to do with the odf discussion, but the point is that having dedicated software for different things and not needing the Internet to do simple things is a very good thing. For me, the need for Internet about everything and everything can be done in a browser is a bad thing which I strongly do not like.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday April 30 2018, @08:50AM
Even Xcode does - its installer doesn't come with any documentation, you have to use Xcode to retrieve then install the docs. Despite having done that I was dismayed to find that quite a lot of its doc was found only on Apple's developer site.
Young people these days are quite surprised when I tell them that I do just fine with no net provided I download what I'm going to need, work on that stuff I downloaded while offline, then upload it once I'm done working on it.
For everybody to be online all the time supports online business. Apple Music, the iOS App Store and the macOS App Store are all huge revenue sources for the Cupertino Fruit Company.
Many supposedly "free" iOS apps aren't truly free at all because the user has to use Apple's In App Purchasing to shut off the ads that most "free" apps retrieve from an Apple data center somewhere way out in the middle of a fruit orchard.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]