I'm not intimately familiar with pdf, but I don't think it is actually proprietary, and it is favorable to genuinely proprietary formats. I believe it just formalizes Postscript conventions. Contrary to flash, etc., Adobe actually published (at least) the first two Postscript specs openly, in book format. I remember pouring over those books when I was first bitten by the programming languages bug. Also, I'm assuming/guessing/hoping that most postscript interpreters would sandbox document evaluation. All-in-all, I'd say PDF is a pretty friendly format, ASCII is certainly appropriate for email, but on the other hand don't spread FUD.
-- Anthony Carrico
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
