Wow, things are really heating up in the standards arena in the past two weeks!

I think one of the saddest things I hear in the blogs is that people are thinking that Adobe is suddenly become interested in standards because they are reading about Microsoft XPS and OpenOffice XML (OpenXML) in the news and think Adobe has to somehow respond. The fact is that Adobe has been very active and proactive in this space for many years.

Here is a time line - click over this great graphic (thanks to Adobes Leonard Rosenthol) to review this;

Most people did not pay much attention when Adobe submitted Acrobat version 1.0 (PDF specification 1.0) to the IRS in 1993 - suddenly all Federal IRS forms were PDF, quickly followed by the States. When Big Brother adopts something, it becomes a defacto standard!

In my not too distant past, I worked for Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation (AGFA) as a consultant - AGFA was an Adobe vendor / partner, where we were using and promoting proprietary / secret sauce technology in our “standard” based ICC profiles and our AGFA “value added” PDF files. AGFA (who was owned by BAYER) was much larger than Adobe. It was Adobe that helped us implement PDF/X and helped us toward to embrace standards.