A seminar on PDF/A will be held in Washington, DC, on March 26. The registration fee is $125. PDF/A is a restricted subset of PDF designed to promote long-term data viability for the purpose of preservation.
The press release contains a bizarre statement:
“At this time, the use of PDF/A is not mandatory in the United States,” said Betsy Fanning, Director, Standards and Member Services, AIIM, “however, that is changing.” “We are learning of draft legislation that is being debated that will make the use of PDF/A mandatory for preserving electronic documents.”
Congress has neither the right nor the technical competence to order us to use particular file formats. Hopefully this was an out-of-context quote about the government’s own use of PDF/A, though even there legislation requiring a specific subset of a specific format would be very strange.
Flash “vs.” HTML: the shadowboxing continues
Posted February 24, 2010 by Gary McGathCategories: commentary
Tags: Flash, HTML
The shadowboxing between Flash and HTML 5 is getting pretty serious. A lot of people are using “HTML 5 video” as a shorthand for “non-Flash video technologies which HTML 5 facilitates,” and Adobe is clearly worried.
An article by Justin Nichols regards HTML 5 and Flash as competitors, and that article is showing a solid five-star rating on feeds.adobe.com, though it isn’t written by an Adobe employee, so it probably expresses a view that’s popular at Adobe. It refers to Flash as a “platform,” and that may be the key point; there’s an unstated suggestion that it can’t just live inside standardized HTML elements. But if it can’t, we’re in for still more rounds of browser incompatibility. Just as “the end of history” when the Soviet empire collapsed was a delusion, the “end of the browser wars” is most likely another.
A New York Times article on the lack of Flash on the iPad is entertaining for its disclaimer at the bottom. The body of the article says:
Then in a correction it notes that that was wrong:
Can I hope they learned their error by reading this blog? Probably not. Even the disclaimer isn’t completely right; HTML 5 is a specification, not a program, so it’s meaningless to call it “open source.” Some implementations of it are open source, and others aren’t.
Standardization of the means of embedding video is a good thing. If that has Adobe worried it will face competition, that’s a good thing too.
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