OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) has finally approved version 1.2 of ODF, the Open Document Format. The announcement can be found at this location. Related blog post by Microsoft's Dough Mahugh and IBM's Rob Weir were already written a few days earlier.
While Rob Weir states in his blog that "Most likely your office suite already supports ODF 1.2 today" it seems to me that few if any suites actually write correct ODF 1.2 files. Many claim to write ODF1.2 but it seems few do.
- Microsoft Excel does not write ODF 1.2.
- Google-docs claims to write ODF 1.2 but its files are missing a required mimetype specification and have many other errors.
- LibreOffice has some long standing errors in its ODF1.2 files, for example this bug that had been filed against the original OpenOffice.org well over a year ago.
- The last OpenOffice.org release had many ODF bugs filed against it, but since its move to Apache nothing much seem to have happened.
Perhaps now that ODF 1.2 has officially been released the ODF 1.2 support of these suites will finally be improved. Users depend on it for interoperability between applications.