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> They [Standards] *can* however, be open, as opposed to proprietary.
Open, proprietary standards are possible. You see it all the time in
infrastructural software. DOS was an open, but proprietary standard. It is
exactly the open, proprietary defacto standards that make vendors rich. An
open proprietary standard makes third-party development of complementing
products possible.
Open does not mean non-proprietary. Open means that there is a public API
that can be used by everyone. Open does not mean that everything is public.
Open is related to use by third-parties.
Proprietary means that it is owned and controlled by a single entity.
Proprietary means that the software's implementation is private. Proprietary
is related to control by the vendor.
Public, committee-based, non-proprietary standards usually fail, because it
takes compromises to get a large group of vendors to agree on how things
will be done. Then, as we saw with the WC3's efforts on developing a
standardized HTML in the face of a defacto standards war, the effort becomes
very political and competitive. One reason why we as TWs did not adopt SGML
years before the web and HTML was that these public standards provide a weak
basis for business.
The PDF standard was developed long before the web. And, it was aimed at the
printing industry as a means of improving production workflow. We, as TWs,
will have to go on using it as long as the printing industry does so. As far
as printing HTML pages goes, attaching a css designed specifically for print
will leave you content web searchable. The inability of search engines to
see PDF content as anything more than a black hole is where the
functionality is lost when PDF content is delivered. Even indexing PDFs and
making that available to the Acrobat browser will not make PDF content
accessible to Internet search engines.
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