Andre’s Blog

The news was just released that Adobe is releasing the entire PDF spec (V1.7) to ISO via AIIM.

“Today’s announcement is the next logical step in the evolution of PDF from de facto standard to a formal, de jure standard,�? said Kevin Lynch

This is really big news as the battle for dominance in document formats heats up. Although PDF has been open for years, the big difference is there is now a clearly documented process and path to get involved with and contribute to the PDF spec. This a huge deal for many large companies and governments a like.

I’m very excited about Adobe’s commitment to the “Open Web” and I think this comes at a crucial time with what’s going on with MSFT and their document formats. Also, it makes me wonder what Adobe might be contributing next? They’ve already been opening up and giving out some of once secret sauce:) As Duane points out:

This reinforces Adobe’s commitment to open standards (see also my earlier blog on the release of flash runtime code to the Tamarin open source project at Sourceforge)

There’s a lot that’s going to happen in the not too distant future in this arena as application delivery and document formats blur even more. We’ve already seen this with Ajax evolving from a pure HTML with links in a browser into a full fledge rich application platform. Just imagine the innovation that can take place in a richer and open environment. I know Adobe “gets it” based on conversations I’ve had with people such as David Mendels and others, so I’m hoping to see them open up more of their presentation layer technologies…hint hint wink wink nudge nudge:) Especially with Apollo coming out, opening up the plumbing of some of these RIA technologies is going to get very interesting.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 2:51 am and is filed under AJAX, Business, Software Development, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.