Not to be out done by Microsoft and the Open Source movements to standardized their own open document frameworks, Adobe has announced that they are finally submitting PDF to ISO as an open standard (press release).

And though, PDF has been available for anyone to develop against for years, this marks the first time that Adobe has allowed active development of the standard to shift out of their hands - and into the hands of the community.

To be honest, I despise PDF format documents. From a usability point of view - they interrupt the flow of my web surfing, and if I'm not desperately in need of the information on one, I'll go back to Google and keep looking for a more easily accessible format. The other reason I dislike them, is opening the PDF reader takes forever. While I'm not on the fastest machine in my company, it shouldn't have to pause and think when opening a document served over the web - yet that is what consistently happens when I open up a PDF file.

What I would like? I would love for Adobe to release the source to Acrobat Reader to the wild, and see if the Open Source community can improve the load time and memory footprint of that piece of software. Or even better, have the renderer for PDF be built directly into the web browsers. If a PDF behaved like a normal served-over-the-web file, I would be much happier about this situation, and much more likely to use them.