IT standards in Norway

Today the Norwegian government decided on the following standards to be used in all public communication:

• Video: Theora/Vorbis/Ogg or H.264/AAC/MP4
• Sound: Vorbis/Ogg, MP3 or FLAC/Ogg
• Image:.jpg or PNG
• Documents: PDF or ODF
• Character encoding: ISO10646 - UTF8

It is great to see that they encourage to use (mainly) open formats and standards. Now it will be interesting to see how long it takes before these standards are actually widely used. Asking Google for help, I see that it will probably take some time before the University of Oslo is following the new guidelines:

• 26,400 from uio.no for filetype:doc
• 9,640 from uio.no for filetype:ppt
• 1,620 from uio.no for filetype:xls

And the government seems to have a few files to convert themselves:

• 1,560 from regjeringen.no for filetype:doc
• 1,090 from regjeringen.no for filetype:xls
• 346 from regjeringen.no for filetype:ppt