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ODT was designed to be standardised: while the predecessor format was very similar too, it relies very heavily on XHTML, SVG, and CSS, to name but three (there'

ODT was designed to be standardised: while the predecessor format was very similar too, it relies very heavily on XHTML, SVG, and CSS, to name but three (there's a lot more). Without being able to call out to existing standards, the ODT spec itself would suddenly become massive. The effort to update the standards appears to be significant and hasn't progressed much in recent years already :/ I think realistically, an Sqlite format could be offered as an option, but the office doc ship has really sailed. Good argument to formalise the spec of Sqlite as a standard though...

dfox 3y ago
The specification is massive (840 pages) even though it is written in very terse way that does not really specify the effects and behavior, only the syntax. On the other hand if one ignores few warts (explosion of local styles and text spans due to ooo:rsid attribute, non-sparse spreedsheets and weird mechanism for styling tables as a few examples) it is really well designed markup for this kind of document data that strikes right balance between it being semantic markup and representing the kinds of stuff users want to do. Compare that with Office OpenXML with stateful formatting empty tags (yes, really, in DOCX <b/> _TOGGLES_ whether following text is bold).