For anyone who missed it, OpenDocument mimetypes are now official and fully registered at IANA.

The next step is for the world's most popular web server to recognize ODF files and send them with the correct mimetype. Without this, products like the Firefox plugin will not work.

UPDATE: The reader package has been replaced by an ODF Tools package on a new page.

Yesterday I wrote about an accessible ODF reader for Linux. Since then I got feedback from the Ubuntu accessibility team and wrote a much improved reader:

Today I met Henrik Omma from the Ubuntu Accessibility team. It was right after I showed the OpenDocument viewer at LugRadio today. Among other things, we talked about how we could turn this viewer into a fully accessible ODF reader. One that can be used, for example, by screen readers. It turns out that this is actually quite easy (on Linux).

TextMaker has made a free OpenDocument viewer (free as in "free beer"). It reads OpenDocument text files, as well as other word processing formats (RTF, .doc, .sxw, etc). Currently it's Windows only. I ran it under wine, and it worked alright on simple documents, but it choked on large documents.

TextMaker Office (on which the viewer is based) is cross-platform; it runs on Linux and Windows. So I have high hopes that they'll make a Linux version later.

LugRadio is in just under two weeks (Sat 22 Jul to Sun 23 Jul) and the OpenDocument Fellowship has been invited to have a stand. Ian and I will be there representing the Fellowship. We'll be there from Saturday noon onwards. Alex Hudson will be around to talk about the Hula project. If any of you can make to LugRadio please come on over!