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XML-based office document standards
This use of de facto, proprietary standards has become increasingly unacceptable, especially within the public sector, where information has to be provided to members of the public without requiring them to have bought software from a particular vendor. This report discusses the issues and provides a brief comparison of the main technical advantages and disadvantages of ODF and OOXML and analyses the possible outcomes of the standards approval process and their significance to education. The report also includes mention of Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) which, although not an XML-based office format, is the most widely used format for documents that are uploaded to the Web.