Graham Perrin's Library tagged html →  View Popular

One Thousand Islands

At the start of the 1990s, the document landscape looked a
little like this:

In the above diagram, each of the bubbles represents
numerous formats

Consolidation

By the mid 1990s, this had changed, in a period of massive
consolidation as the web, Microsoft and Adobe starved rivals of oxygen

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One fairly unheralded aspect of this was the rise in the publishing
community, including high-end vendors, of an awareness of the benefits of
co-operation and standardization of different kinds. SGML was born out of such
cooperation at ISO

Realignment

By the end of the 1990s, there had been a realignment of the
rationales for the formats: in particular, HTML had moved from the dumb end of
town into having its own compelling rationale

Of these formats, Microsoft controlled .DOC, .RTF, and was
actively involved at W3C in XML and HTML development. PDF was controlled by
Adobe.

Digestion/Stagnation

The early part of the 2000s was a period of extraordinary
growth for applications of XML, matched by stagnation in the other areas.

Standardization

In the late noughties, a period of standardization broke
through, with all the major formats being taken by their stakeholders through
industry consortia and on to ISO.

The enormous controversy over the standardization of OOXML
comes largely down to, in my opinion, two different views of the emerging
landscape.

Towards Web-able Document Formats

So what is there that we can do to nudge us in the direction
of this large-scale interoperability?

W3C versus ISO

please have a look at:




• Nate's lightning talk about collective.amberjack — this has much more info on the technical implementation and capabilities, recommended before you read the rest of this PLIP!
  
• The Amberjack web site
  

comes from one of Microsoft’s own newsletters:

side-by-side in Word and IE:

(click for full size)