Company
Why a document should be a file
Interactive content usually lives on someone else's platform. We think it should be something you can keep.
There is a quiet asymmetry in how we work. The things we only need to read — a contract, a report, a paper — arrive as files. We can keep them, archive them, open them in ten years. The things we need to use — a calculator for a quote, a tracker for a project, an exercise for a course — arrive as accounts on someone else’s service.
The second kind is more useful and less durable. It works until the subscription lapses, the export loses half the data, or the service is retired. And the knowledge inside it — the formula, the rules, the model — is rarely something you can take with you.
A file is a promise
A file makes a few promises that platforms rarely do:
- It is yours. You decide where it is stored and who receives it.
- It works offline. Nothing has to be reachable for it to open.
- It outlives its maker. A documented format can be read by software that does not exist yet.
- It is a unit. You can send exactly this, at this version, to exactly this person.
IDOP is our attempt to give interactive things those promises. An IDOP document carries its interface, its logic and its data in one file, and saves what you enter back into that file.
The obvious objection
Files that contain code have a bad history. Macros, executables disguised as documents, attachments that phone home — the reasons people are wary of active content are good ones.
So the format starts from the assumption that the file is hostile. A reader checks every byte before anything runs, refuses the whole file on any violation, runs the code in a sandbox with no network, and only lets a document reach a server that it declared, for a purpose it stated, after you agreed. Your keys stay in the reader; the document never sees them.
None of this makes a document trustworthy in what it says. It makes opening one safe in what it can do.
What we are building
The format is published as an open specification. IDOP Cloud is where we run it today: open a file, start from one of forty templates, keep your documents, share them by link. The rest of the ecosystem — an editor, native readers, tools for developers — is on our product page, each with an honest status.
We do not think every document should be interactive. We think the ones that are should not have to live somewhere else.