Persistent resolvable identifiers are to be given using HTTP 1.1 (according to Internet RFC 2616) and URLs (RFC 3986).
Standard PDFs saved by OS X applications or by printing to file will need to be passed through the likes of Adobe Acrobat Pro to bring full compliance, but as of Yosemite still default to the PDF 1.3 standard. Thus they can be cast in PDF versions 1.4 or 1.7, and may embed other PDF/A files, but not other types of embedded file.
Where editing is not intended, particularly for static use and long-term preservation, documents are to use PDF/A-1 or PDF/A-2, but not PDF/A-3.
Metadata are supported, but whilst there are internal government standards for images and documents kept in sharepoints, more general standards are promised for the future.ĭocuments intended for viewing live over the Internet are to use HTML5, the de facto standard supported by all modern browsers. Whilst text content should be kept within the narrow ASCII standard as much as possible, it is to be encoded using Unicode UTF-8 (detailed in Internet RFC 3629) and the Unicode 6.2 standard, although Yosemite currently supports Unicode 7.0, it appears. New government standards, detailed here, concern documents rather than just data the latter may be moved in CSV, or for more complex structured data using XML or RDF, as appropriate. In future, files downloaded from government sources, or shared with colleagues in the central civil service, should be ODF or PDF, rather than Word or Excel documents. These were updated just before the 2015 General Election. If you work for or with central government, its agencies, or a non-departmental public body, you should be switching from proprietary document standards to the new UK open standards for government.ĭuring the glorious weather in July 2014, the Cabinet Office confirmed to Microsoft’s overt annoyance that it was adopting open standards centred on Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2. How will they and we cope with new official open standards? Most Central Government departments still depend on Microsoft Office.