That sounds an awful lot like browser JS/HTML/CSS standards. Or perhaps the OpenGL standard. Doubtless you'd have a long incubation period of inconsistent cross-application behavior, and a proliferation of vendor-specific extensions.

Microsoft would have to be involved in any such effort for it to amount to anything, and I'm not sure they really have much incentive to do so - unless it is along the lines of, "here, LibreOffice, this is our document API, go implement it, and, by the way, make it compatible with all these legacy VBA scripts out in the wild".

I agree to a point, but actually Microsoft wouldn't have to be heavily involved really. With ODF, that push didn't come from Microsoft and eventually landed with standards bodies. Microsoft fought it all the way, and even though they muddied the water with OOXML, they had to stop implementing binary, opaque and hard to manipulate file formats.

They were then forced (by market demand) to implement ODF. I can see something similar happening in terms of document automation: only maybe this time it might be quicker given there is experience around the DOM in web browsers already, so a model is already usable.

> That's a cost and a vendor lockin that will need to be addressed at some point regardless. Governments of all stripes are trying to migrate away from proprietary things like this as it's a risk to governance.

[citation needed]

Probably not a good idea to use [citation needed] as an argument in discussions with the guy who created [citation needed] (me).

1. http://www.ausgoal.gov.au/open-formats

2. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hm-treasury-and-o...

3. https://www.data.gov/open-gov/

4. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Office_Format (China, that great bastion of transparency!)

I think that will do for now :-)

Eh, either you die the hero or you live long enough to become the villain.

Your first link included Office Open XML as one of its office formats. The US site is about data in "machine-readable formats" being released by governement agencies. None of it seems to indicate an effort to move away from proprietary software, just interchangeable formats.

Office Open XML is indeed an open format. And you asked me to provide a citation for my assertion that shows that governments are trying to migrate away from proprietary formats.

For the U.S. URL, I should have probably been more specific: try http://www.data.gov/developers/harvesting

"As part of Project Open Data most government offices are transitioning to make all of their metadata available via a standard schema contained by a data.json file. These are treated just as any other harvest source."

Actually, I should have pointed you to Project Open Data really, found here:

https://project-open-data.cio.gov/

Citations provided!