“Adobe is pushing hard to get Flash, PDF, and other technologies used to realize recent open government initiatives. The problem is that the technologies fall short of the goal of full accessibility, and cause problems for those seeking to use government-supplied data in any meaningful way.”
I can’t think of worse formats for publishing open government data than PDF and flash. Even word documents can be better parsed than the above mentioned two.
The amount of money Adobe are spending on their open government advertising campaign is ridiculous. Further more, allot of the data published by the US government has been converted from XML, easily parsed, to PDF and then published.
Sure, having handy PDF files to read is great if I just want to read the published documents but what if I’d like to parse the information? Publishing in the original XML along with the PDF would be much better for all concerned.
Don’t even get me started on flash!
[/rant]
What is the government doing making flash animations in the first place? Get back to work, government!