Andrew Shebanow:

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.

Good point, and I regret having lumped PDF in with Flash in my criticism yesterday. It’s the idea that Flash should have any role whatsoever in a serious debate on open publishing formats that I have a problem with.