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Adobe Pushing For Flash and PDF In Open Government Initiative
angryrice tips news that Adobe seems to be campaigning for the inclusion of Flash and PDF in the Obama administration's efforts at increasing government transparency and openness. A post from the Sunlight Labs blog is critical of Adobe's undertaking, in part since PDF is often "non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted." They also say government's priority should be to publish datasets and the APIs to interact with them, rather than choosing how they're displayed in fancy graphs and charts.
HTML has the same problem as PDF ... it describes how to display the data, not what it is. Using CSS and XML would be a far better idea. As in software development, separate the presentation from the data. It's fine for the government to provide both, as long as they're separate. You would always have the base XML to describe the actual data, and it's in an easily machine parsable format.