JD on EP

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at Desktop Linux pulls together standards-related aspects.

Andrew Shebanow: "I believe that the history will view this announcement as an historic one for Adobe and even for the software industry as a whole. There are several reasons why I believe this is so...."

More initial reaction from Ryan Stewart, Andre Charland, Bob Sutor, Robert Scoble.

A morning news trawl doesn't pull much original content... Google News has mostly the same two or three articles reprinted endlessly in hometown newspapers, although in this case their clustering helps... the blogsearch engines are full of splogs reprinting paragraphs written by others to capture Google AdSense revenue... it's hard to find someone with something original to say.

Live, original blogsearch results, from beyond MXNA: Chris Kelley, Stephen Wrighton. (For MXNA, here's search on PDF.)

Slashdot has a thread of original commentary (although not all people talking have first read the material), while Digg has multiple citations, none with critical mass.

Mary Jo Foley of "All About Microsoft" thinks it's, uh, all about Microsoft. Others talk about Microsoft's own creation of PDF (which, as feared, seems to be substandard in implementation). These opinions tend not to cite the prior release of individual PDF profiles to standards bodies or the sheer number of third-party creators around the published specs, the maturity of the ecology. The topic of Microsoft enters all conversations eventually.

Techmeme has a cluster of a dozen articles.

Don Fluckinger has a solid write-up at PDFZone.com, with context on the standards process, and acknowledgment that debates on "what does open really mean" will continue.

Well, that's more than you can say for MS's OpenXML. Maybe because of actions like this, in the next few years they'll finally be forced to play nice with standards. Good on Adobe. I suspect we'll see swf on there one day once things settle down in that arena.

Judith Dinowitz has an account of a press conference call she attended today.

Ars Technica has a rewrite, and the discussion hasn't yet taken off. (This is usually a little more informed than commentary on Slashdot.)

Dr. Dobbs has an original rewrite of the press release material.

Digg commentary has centered around this thread, although Digg commentary isn't always the most reflective and illuminating.

Scott Fulton of BetaNews has a significant amount of original reporting on the whole standards process: "Adobe's efforts with the AIIM group to entrench PDF extend back to 2002. And today, the company's Director of Product Management confirmed to BetaNews that the actual PDF standardization process - requests, meetings, submissions, discussions, revisions, etc. - actually began in 1995...."

More: "Adobe announced it would be submitting not an implementation of PDF, but the actual document format itself - the 1.7 edition, recently released for use with the Acrobat 8.0 suite. One major unresolved question, however, is whether the AIIM process is geared for managing the submission of a format, as opposed to an implementation, before the ISO. The ISO codifies processes and techniques as well as formats, but the submission of a complete format would be different from any kind of work AIIM and Adobe have done together before...."

Scott also has reporting here on how the evolutionary pace of a format has a bearing on the size of a group which determines it: "But since 1993, PDF itself has been a more rapidly evolving format than a standards format timetable can keep up with - now on its eighth public version in a fourteen-year history. In prior years, the fact that PDF is, to some degree, nebulous has been the excuse for why it has not been submitted to the ISO or another organization in the past: you can't codify, or set in stone, something designed to change as user needs change."