[Linux-aus] comment for an article on Government website accessibility

[Mike Carden]

Hi Dahna.

> less than five per cent were in RTF.

Zero percent RTF would be good, but getting down to five is a step in
the right direction. RTF is a bad, bad proprietary format that is
rarely rendered the same way twice by any two pieces of software. Even
software from the format's originator is inconsistent with it.

> In contrast, over 95
> per cent of the documents examined in 2008 were in PDF, being a
> proprietary software format.

Well, no it's not really. PDF 1.4 is a fully documented and non
proprietary ISO standard:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF

Many, many free implementaions of PDF viewers are out there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software#Viewers

What would be nice would be all government web sites being standards
compliant in their HTML and browser agnostic.

Cheers,
Michael