Open Government and PDF

Daring Fireball just linked to two equally foolish articles about how PDFs are “bad” for Open Government.

The premise of these articles is that the world would be a much better place if all governments would publish all of their information on the web in HTML or XML. You know what else would make the world a much better place? Unicorns.

The issue at hand is not whether governments should pick HTML or PDF. The issue at hand is whether governments are capable of publishing information at all. Show me an HTML creation tool that creates high quality, standards conformant markup from a Word document or any of the zillions of editing tools that government employees use. Now add in all the tools used by people who submit documents to the government. And all the versions of those tools released in the last 20 years. Now make sure that the HTML/XML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed. Guess what? There are no such conversion tools available. And who would pay to make sure that everyone had access to these tools and knew how to use them correctly?

Creating PDFs is trivially easy for all these cases, whether you use Acrobat or something built into your OS. It works regardless of what tool was used to create the content in the first place, and it works on pretty much every OS out there and on mobile.

HTML/XML Standards nerds should get a grip. They aren’t even in the running to compete with PDF here.