Fri, 21/12/2007 - 00:28 — peterv

Norway made an interesting decision to mandate Open Standards by 2009:

  • HTML should be the primary format for publication of public information on the Internet.
  • PDF (1.4 or newer, or PDF/A - ISO 19005-1) is compulsory when you wish to preserve the original layout of a document.
  • ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) must be used when publishing documents that are meant to be changed after downloading, eg. forms that are to be filled in by the user.

All three are truly open standards (with a Royalty Free IPR policy, so allowing both proprietary and free software implementations). In case you wondered, while PDF is not yet an Open Standard, PDF/A (ISO 19005-1) actually is (it is an ISO standard, that is a subset of PDF 1.4 and there are promises not to sue from Adobe regarding implementations of the standard). I assume HTML means W3C HTML 4.01 in this context? I hope this will allow to forbid publication of any web pages that are not strictly adhering to the W3C standard.