The premise of these articles is that the world would be a much better place if all governments would publish all of their information on the web in HTML or XML. You know what else would make the world a much better place? Unicorns.

The issue at hand is not whether governments should pick HTML or PDF. The issue at hand is whether governments are capable of publishing information at all. Show me an HTML creation tool that creates high quality, standards conformant markup from a Word document or any of the zillions of editing tools that government employees use. Now add in all the tools used by people who submit documents to the government. And all the versions of those tools released in the last 20 years. Now make sure that the HTML/XML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed. Guess what? There are no such conversion tools available. And who would pay to make sure that everyone had access to these tools and knew how to use them correctly?

Creating PDFs is trivially easy for all these cases, whether you use Acrobat or something built into your OS. It works regardless of what tool was used to create the content in the first place, and it works on pretty much every OS out there and on mobile.

HTML/XML Standards nerds should get a grip. They aren’t even in the running to compete with PDF here.

As it happens, I know James from our days together at Apple. He is an exceptionally smart guy and quite the character. I remember reading his presentation at the time of the trial and marveling at it’s sarcasm, its cynicism, its far-reaching vision, and, most importantly, its lack of ethics. Given that I’d just spent two years at Adobe battling with Microsoft on a variety of issues, it was amazing to see how many of those tactics Microsoft were still a key part of Microsoft’s arsenal.

One of the more interesting posts on James’ new blog explains why he is coming forward now to write a new blog. In it, he says:

First, the global financial melt-down forced an epiphany. We at Microsoft always felt that we were on the side of free markets and unfettered capitalism—you know, the Good Guys. But so did the guys at Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie Mae, and all of the other failed financial institutions. Even Alan Greenspan, the High Priest of free markets, has had to concede that there’s “a flaw” in free market economics—a flaw that led directly to the current financial collapse.

My belief that I was one of the Good Guys was similarly flawed. This is now inescapable. I was wrong. Many of the TE practices that I developed, taught, and espoused were wrong. Anyone who continues to practice them is wrong. As a first step towards making amends for my past wrongdoing, I must make this clear, and widely known.

Its great to see that James has recognized the error in his ways, at least in part. But I found it telling that the global financial melt-down is what forced James to have an epiphany. You see, when I knew him, James was a die-hard libertarian¹. The kind who would always drive 90 MPH on the freeway on principle. His reference to Alan Greenspan here is not just a comment on the economy – Greenspan was a member of Ayn Rand’s inner circle and as such is one of the heroes of the libertarian movement. I suspect he is one of James’ personal heroes as well.

But what both Greenspan and James fail to have done is to connect the dots: the “flaw” in free market economics is actually the fatal flaw that occurs whenever someone tries to apply a pure philosophy to the real world: people and organizations do not act consistently with philosophies. In the case of libertarianism, the flaw is that self-interest is rarely enlightened, and people can rationalize anything.

James’ strategy at Microsoft was a case in point: they rationalized that what they were doing was justified because the markets reward the strong. The irony, of course, was that they were not acting in an enlightened way: monopolizing the market did wonders for Microsoft’s revenues and share price in the short term, but the damage done to the overall market for computer software was immense. In the longer term, this will hurt Microsoft more than it ever helped it, and in fact you could argue that Microsoft’s stock price malaise the last several years was a direct result of the market ossification that occurred.

¹ I use the term loosely, encompassing both libertarianism and objectivism. Wikipedia has lots of information on the many variants of libertarianism, objectivism, and the arguments between the two camps.

It’s also cool how the Mozilla/Firefox effort was fueled in part by the donation of Tamarin and Tamarin Tracing to Mozilla. I hope this collaboration can continue to be productive.

My favorite smart-aleck comment was from Dave Shea:

 IE8. Acid2. Better bundle up, it’s a cold one in hell today.

[Update 12-19-2007: fixed name of technology. thanks for the correction.]

I have to say I’m terribly, terribly hurt that I didn’t get any linkage on the whole ‘iPhone runs as root’ thing. I was way ahead of the curve on that one, and I wasn’t even “hysterical” about it… [this is a joke, for those not attuned to such things]

One other cynical point for you, which I didn’t blog about. Why did Jobs put out that letter now, 5-6 months before it will be released? I saw someone arguing on their blog (sorry, can’t remember where) that it was because Apple has realized there are limits to secrecy. Yea, right. I personally think they did it because they see the iPhone hacking culture getting a little too vibrant for comfort, and they wanted to take some wind out of its sails. Why spend your nights and weekends hacking on something when Apple will make it all easy in a few months? Plus there is no longer the thrill of doing something Apple doesn’t want you to do. Will it work? Doubtful.

As a side note, Robert Cringely has written an interesting take on the purported Apple/Google partnership. I agree completely that Apple would never allow a deal where Google got brand supremacy.

Contrast that with the process by which Adobe is submitting PDF to ISO. We’ve bent over backwards to ensure that the submission is as clean as it can possibly be, and as a result the feedback we’ve gotten has been extremely positive. If Microsoft believes their own stuff is so great, they should follow our lead and make it into a standard the right way: by proving the value of their solution, responding to constructive criticism, and building a consensus.

• ActionMonkey, which will merge SpiderMonkey and Tamarin. Not really a new project, but lots more details are available.
• ScreamingMonkey, which will allow Tamarin to be invoked from within IE. Not clear to me whether this is really Tamarin or ActionMonkey that gets integrated. Is it “just” Tamarin’s ECMAScript engine, or is there more?
• IronMonkey, which is an effort to port IronPython and IronRuby to run on Tamarin.

Several people have wrote about this already, most notably Sam Ruby, Dion Almaer of Ajaxian.com, and Adobe’s own John Dowdell.

These are all very cool projects. Being able to use a modern, high performance ECMAScript engine within IE could be huge. I wonder if this will embarrass the IE folks into updating their ancient JavaScript engine?

But the project I’m most interested in is IronMonkey. I even talked about wanting such a thing way back in November 2006 in a comment on Sam Ruby’s blog:

Yes, a Ruby or Python environment that generated AVM2 bytecodes would be awesome as part of Firefox etc. No more need for things like RJS – just write your entire web app in Rails, using HTML and/or Flash for presentation.

It is interesting that Mozilla chose to use IronPython and IronRuby as the basis for this work, though. I have a lot of respect for Jim Huginin and company, but using the Microsoft languages means a lot of hassles:

• since the languages are written in C#, they have to use Mono to compile the compilers. Not a big deal, but yet another dependency to manage.
• although MsPL is a pretty open license, I don’t think the actual source repositories for the compilers allow contributions from anyone other than Microsoft employees. Thus Mozilla is going to have to make a downstream repository and deal with all the version skew issues. Be interesting to see if Microsoft fixes this problem eventually. I hope so. If they don’t they are missing out on a key benefit of open source.

Would have preferred them to use JRuby and Jython as the base, personally. Still, I applaud the Mozilla folks for coming up with such a compelling vision for JavaScript’s future, and look forward to the day when I can write AJAX apps using Ruby on the client.