OpenDocument, PDF, ISO and more

I have readed in Slashdot and Barrapunto (in spanish) that OpenDocument has been voted in as ISO/IEC 26300.

A year ago I was in a conference organized by Adobe. One of the papers talked about the problem of electronic persistence of documents, because, what will happen twenty years from now when I'll try to read a Word document created using Office 2000? How I'll read it?.

Adobe was moved to stablish an electronic document format for long term preservation, giving a way to describe a document like the paper version of it, and without any trick like macromedia flash, movies, audio or nothing else that can be saved from the time.

The problem with PDf standard is that it's not modifiable in a easy way, and that's the reason there is people trying to create an electronic standard for electronic documents. In the ring you can found two fighters: Microsoft with his new Office release using his own XML standard and OpenOffice with OpenDocument.

It's clear that the future of document management is the XML, we can see it in movements and protocols like SOAP or XHTML, but the problem is to reach a consensus to stablish only ONE standard in electronic document management.

I'm so pessimistic, I know it, but I guess the future will be an open standard (OpenDocument) used by a few of us, and a widely used format used by everybody else (MS Office). I also guess that the release 2 or 3 of that standard will get the fusion of this formats giving us a real standard used by everybody 5 or 6 years from now, like happens with HTML and the Microsoft extensions.

I'm sure that we'll need to wait for it but we'll see it.