OpenFDD

The End of the Static PDF

OpenFDD replaces static, "visual-first" documents with data-first interactive containers. Our architecture provides documents that are natively human-readable, cryptographically verifiable, and locally persistent without the need for complex infrastructure.

Strategic Advocacy & Benefits

FDD adoption significantly streamlines data consumption by addressing massive operational bottlenecks natively:

• Open Source & License-Free An open specification without licensing or proprietary requirements translates to significantly less cost to generate and maintain institutional documents.
• Reduced Processing Overhead A lower computing and processing cost per document generation because there is far less translation necessary from internal data models to the output file structure.
• Pristine Data Access Removes the requirement of using LLMs, OCR pipelines, or brittle XML parsing frameworks to access and use the data (which often yields imperfect results). Developers can retrieve the raw data object easily, without translation errors or complicated infrastructure to support the format.
• Interact Your Way Interact with the payload via the medium of your choice. Use the built-in, secure UI, an office suite, custom data modeling tools, a coding IDE, or an AI Agent—the choice is exclusively yours.
• Decentralized Infrastructure Removes the massive root infrastructure costs of maintaining complex API endpoints for institutions aiming to support parallel and downstream industries. Instead of building thousands of webhooks for the mortgage industry pulling bank statements, or colleges pulling verified school records, institutions can simply issue a standardized, verifiable `.fdd` file.

Technical Foundations

An FDD container serves as an offline-first Single-Page Web App carrying its own encrypted payload database:

• Cryptographically Verified: Layered digital signatures natively prevent untraceable tampering.
• AI Native JSON-LD: Direct object injection providing perfect, machine-readable syntax for ML models.
• 100% JS-Free Security: Complete security isolating parsing logic via Declarative HTML protocols and CSS rendering tricks—thwarting malware executing within the container logic.
• Local Persistence: Allows documents to natively auto-sync user-modified fields back locally ensuring changes operate within an active localized session state without losing context.

Tooling & Ecosystem Guide

The OpenFDD ecosystem provides a full suite of JavaScript libraries to securely compose, sign, verify, and interact with FDD files.

• 1. Identity & Key Generation (fdd-identity) Generate your institution's Ed25519 keypair and publish a W3C DID Document at https://yourdomain.com/.well-known/did.json. Any viewer can resolve it to verify your documents.
  npm install -g @coreyburns/node-fdd
fdd-identity keygen ./keys && fdd-identity did ./keys/public.pem yourdomain.com
• 2. Pack & Sign in One Step (fdd-sign pack) Combines packing + cryptographic signing. The Ed25519 signature covers both the VC data and the HTML template — tampering with either invalidates it.
  fdd-sign pack template.html data.json ./keys/private.pem did:web:yourdomain.com output.fdd
  Recipients verify with fdd-sign verify output.fdd or extract data with fdd-sign parse output.fdd.
• 3. Parsing & Viewing (fdd-js) Renders .fdd containers in any web platform. Automatically resolves the issuer's did:web identity and injects a cryptographic Trust Badge (✅ Verified / ⚠️ Invalid / ❓ Unresolved) — documents always load instantly.
  <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/Spuds0588/open-fdd@v1.2.0/lib/fdd-js/src/fdd.js"></script>
• 4. Viewing Locally (Chrome Extension) For end-users opening .fdd files directly from disk. Acts as a Security Shield: sandboxes rendering, enables file-system saves, and strips hostile embedding vectors.

📣 How You Can Help Advocate!

The success of OpenFDD relies entirely on community pushback against static PDFs. Leverage your sphere of influence to write, record, and share why data-first local documents resolve massive privacy and architecture bottlenecks!

Publicly demand Browsers, SaaS providers, and App Developers to explicitly add native support for the OpenFDD architecture!