Gov.uk adopting open standards

Duncan Stephen
Monday 25 August 2014

Making things open, making things better

The Government Digital Service has announced that in future all government documents will use open formats by default.

All documents for viewing must be available in either HTML5 or PDF/A. Documents that users will want to edit must be available in Open Document Format, not a proprietary format such as Microsoft Word.

The digital communications team has always aimed to publish as much content as possible as HTML, as this maximises the accessibility and compatibility of the content. Not all devices are able to open PDFs or Word documents. With the increasing adoption of mobile devices and products such as the Chromebook, this is becoming increasingly important.

The fact that Gov.uk is now emphasising the importance of open formats is an interesting development.

We’re making this switch because we want:

  • users to have a choice about the software they use to read government documents
  • people working in government to be able to share their work more easily (we think sharing is a good thing: one of our design principles is “Make things open, it makes them better”)
  • to make it easier and cheaper to do business with government (no-one should have to pay for specialist software just to send us some information)

One thought I have about this is that, while open standards are clearly better in theory, iOS devices appear not to be able to open formats such as .odt by default. But they can open Word files at least to some extent. I would be interested to know if this causes any issues for the Gov.uk plan.

See also: Open formats for documents: what publishers to Gov.uk need to know

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