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This is just too good to miss. Doc Searls lets rip:

< RantOn >

See, the manifesto is a @#$%^&*()+!!{{{{{FUCKING}}}}}!! .pdf. Have I made it clear I hate .pdfs? I do.

Says here “our PDFs don’t suck.” Because they’re beautiful and “a joy to read.” Excuse me, they do suck if what they contain isn’t also on the Web in relatively ugly but open, unowned, nonproprietary, standard and non-infuriating HTML (or its more modern and no less standard successors and derivatives). PDFs, no matter how beautiful, are not a joy to quote (how about all them line breaks you have to edit out?), or to link to.

Forgive me. I’m in a bad mood today about people breaking the Web.

One way they do it is by taking writing off the Web and offering it only as a .pdf “download”. AAARg.

A prime example, to me at least, of not knowing when to leave money on the table. Think where we would all be now, including Adobe, if the company had opened up the .pdf standard and Acrobat, way back when the Web was young. Perhaps there are millions (or billions?) Adobe might not have made. But I’m sure there are many more that they could have made because of the .pdf standard (rather than with it, which is what they chose to do). But alas.

< RantOff >

Do you get the impression that Doc hates pdfs?