This is something very important: Don't focus on aplications (FOSS or not) but on open data formats and proper import/export mechanisms so you can switch applications easily.
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This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate,
ODF’s mandate is the document-layer expression of that principle, as you cannot claim digital sovereignty while allowing your documents to be locked in proprietary formats controlled by a single vendor.
incredibly based
Meanwhile OnlyOffice is saving to Macroslop format by default: https://piefed.social/c/libreoffice/p/1803568/libreoffice-blasts-fake-open-source-onlyoffice-for-working-with-microsoft-to-lock-users
At least something good amid all the bad news regarding the future of software systems
I think this is not (entirely) true. Or at least I have some questions:
- Is this an enacted law that I missed? Because it looks like it is a work in progress.
- "All levels of government" Really? We have federalism. I am not sure, if that can be mandated by the governments.
BTW: https://deutschland-stack.gov.de/
I have searched a bit further: For federal and state governments, ODF is binding through IT Planning Council resolutions and federal guidelines, but there is no formal law yet mandating its use. Also, this is not binding for local authorities, but virtual it is.
It's a typo, they wanted to make support of the IDF mandatory
Bravo. Can't believe it has taken this long for a gov't to realize storing everything in a poorly obfuscated format makes no sense.
good!
Germany’s decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates. They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.
I'm gonna repeat this, as expressed here, to a few people
As a guy who worked with property recods in US fucking yes. Some states gove the records in a closed format invented by one company. So you have to have their software if you want to work in some states.
Add it to the pile of illegal shit that is legal I guess...
Hopefully the rest of Europe will follow.
Oddly the UK is somehow ahead here https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-open-document-formats-odf-in-your-organisation
Despite being so shit in many different respects (a chronic use of external consultants and contractors means the UK seems less likely than other European countries to make progress on a sovereign tech stack), the UK is pretty good with its data. There's a surprisingly amount of data that's released and is in a sensible format.
During the teachers strikes last year, I ended up using playing around making visualisations using the data about the number of teachers in various parts of the country, and I was pleased to see how much there was there and how clearly it was documented. There are very few things I'm proud of the UK for, so I am glad to have this as one
The UK seemingly got some cool nerds in the government: the gov.uk sites were regarded as the golden standard of design and accessibility in the 2010s, idk about currently. Commercial designers straight up studied gov.uk's design guidelines to see how a job like that should be done.
Yeah, I knew that, it's super cool, and it came to mind as I was writing my earlier comment.
What's neat about the website stuff is that even if it's not as good now (idk, I haven't looked), that value they created is still there in the older case study — there were so many good resources. I was the disability rep in a few student societies, as well as in a few volunteer orgs after uni, and we referenced the guidelines a few times. Good resources like that are especially useful in those contexts — because they helped turn "that would be nice, but we don't have the resources to implement accessibility in our materials" into "okay, let's put our money where our mouth is and do our best to make something as accessible as we can"
Wow, some good news on Lemmy? Sign me up!
Sick! Are there any more of these?
!positivity@lemmy.today (shameless self-promotion)
Hell yes. I wonder how many man-hours of strategy meetings MS had on their calendars to fend that decision off.
It's so good to see initiatives like these! Hope it spreads across Europe and the World.
Isn't odf the one used by libre office?
More than that, it's standardization made MS panic and pseudo-standardize their OOXML (.docx & co.) a year later, since some govt wanted to switch to ODF back in 2007, instead of relying on some proprietary format. The pseudo, because most of the format is proprietary extensions (and only the strict variant is standard-conformant, which MS doesn't set as default), which made the standardization a ...unusual process.
Btw, usually, there's only one standard format for a specific usecase.
Edit: typo
Yes and they switched form MsOffice to Libre like few years ago for all government agencies
Isn't it odt that LibreOffice uses? I wonder what the difference is.
Gotta love Germany.
Fun fact: the German equivalent of the BBC, DW, will teach you German if you want to learn it, for free. A but niche but a nice thing to do!
DW isn't the equivalent of the BBC. It's more of a equivalent to e.g. Radio Free Europe. DW is entirely funded by the German government, in contrast to the BBC or ARD/ZDF which are independently funded. I'm not saying DW is bad, but it isn't the equivalent of the BBC.
Their contract with Microslop must be up for renegotiation.
I understand why the world is the way it is, but still it should have been obvious all along that it is not ideal for the government to data in a file format owned by a company. Even worse, a foreign company.
Most—certainly not all, but most—documents that are written in Microsoft Word, or in LibreOffice Writer, would be better off as either markdown plain text files, or as LaTeX.
CMV.
*with accessibility tags applied.
I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean here. Both markdown and LaTeX are plain text. They're easily read by a screen reader. Though unless the screen reader is specially-designed for LaTeX support, it may be difficult to comprehend. That's on the screen reader though, not the document format.
I assume they mean stuff like image descriptions that you can add in Microslop Word (don't know about LibreOffice). It's quite a neat feature that wouldn't work with markdown (might work with LaTeX), because these image descriptions are not visible to someone reading a document.
Image descriptions are a thing in markdown. Images are inserted into markdown documents with this syntax:

Cool, didn't know that one yet!
Correct, accessibility also differentiates between titles and content, to better assist readers who use a screen reader.
I replied to the other user showing how markdown image descriptions work. Titles are added with hashes.
# title
## subtitle
Text
### sub-sub title
Etc.
Screen reader should pick that up.
It's a bit trickier in LaTeX (depending on layout), given they convert to an untagged pdf by default using pdftex. For defaults such as section/subsection etc I think some auto-tagging has been added, but my memory is not great.
Issues crop up when you need to hack something (e.g. indenting parts of a proof using the quote environment to aid readability, creating more complex tables, or just using coloured text to indicate element relations), and here manual tagging is a must!
Hear hear
90% of everything I read/write is either plaintext, explicit .md, or some .md-adjacent proprietary markup language (Atlassian, BBcode,...)
Sure, but 99% of MSO/LibreOffice users would quit after about 45s of trying to put together a document in LaTeX.
I don't think it's really possible to have a reasonable argument against a vendor agnostic open standard in most cases.
Typst is the modern LaTeX. It's really good, fast and compiler errors are actually understandable.
Nice! A huge blow to those still trying to push Microsoft
When are we going to have the equivalent for PDF documents, with the ability to comment, fill and sign, as in AdobeAR?
The framework adopts a “Made in EU first” principle, requires open interfaces and local data storage, mandate open source development where proprietary ownership would otherwise apply, and explicitly aims to reduce vendor lock-in effects.
This is such a wet dream 🥹

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