We’ve been hearing reports of Adobe Flash’s death for years. But it’s not over till Adobe says it is, and now Adobe has declared a termination date for Flash support.
Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
In a GitHub comment, Johan van der Knijff noted how messy it is to determine the version of a PDF file. He looked at a file with the header characters “%PDF-1.8”. DROID says this isn’t a PDF file at all.
By a strict reading of the PDF specification, it isn’t. The version number has to be in the range 1.0 through 1.7. Being this strict seems like a bad idea, since it would mean format recognition software will fail to recognize any future versions of the format. (JHOVE doesn’t care what character comes after the period.)
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Photoshop’s native format, PSD, doesn’t get a lot of discussion. It’s Photoshop’s default format, and people use it for projects if only for that reason, so we really should know something about it. A lively place to start is “Fun Photoshop File Format Facts” on the Postlight blog. For serious investigation, look at Adobe’s specification. There’s also a short article on archiveteam.org, with some information about the format’s history.
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As most people who read this blog know, the development of PDF didn’t end with the ISO 32000 (aka PDF 1.7) specification. Adobe has published three extensions to the specification. These aren’t called PDF 1.8, but they amount to a post-ISO version.
The ISO TC 171/SC 2 technical committee is working on what will be called PDF 2.0. The jump in major revision number reflects the change in how releases are being managed but doesn’t seem to portend huge changes in the format. PDF is no longer just an Adobe product, though the company is still heavily involved in the spec’s continued development. According to the PDF Association, the biggest task right now is removing ambiguities. The specification’s language will shift from describing conforming readers and writers to describing a valid file. This certainly sounds like an improvement. The article mentions that several sections have been completely rewritten and reorganized. What’s interesting is that their chapter numbers have all been incremented by 4 over the PDF 1.7 specification. We can wonder what the four new chapters are.
Leonard Rosenthol gave a presentation on PDF 2.0 in 2013.
As with many complicated projects, PDF 2.0 has fallen behind its original schedule, which expected publication in 2013. The current target for publication is the middle of 2016.
Steve Jobs gets a posthumous victory as Adobe will not be developing Flash for mobile devices past version 11. Adobe states that:
HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.
Files that Last: Digital Preservation for Everygeek, an e-book to bring the message of digital preservation to the broader geek world.
Mad File Format Science 
The future of TIFF
Is TIFF a legacy format?
The most recent version of the TIFF specification, 6.0, dates from 1992. Adobe updated it with three technical notes, the latest coming out in 2002. Since then there has been nothing.
The format is solid, but the past quarter-century has seen reasons to enhance it. BigTIFF is a variant of the format to accommodate larger files. It isn’t backward-compatible with TIFF, but the changes mostly concern data lengths and are easy to add to a TIFF interpreter. The format sits in a kind of limbo, since Adobe owns the spec but is no longer updating it. There have been new tags which have achieved consensus acceptance but don’t have official status. AWare Systems has a list of known tags but has no reliable way to say which ones are private and which are generally accepted. There’s no way to add a new compression or encryption algorithm, or any other new feature, and give it official status.
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