I was forced to fill out an XFA form (that was pretending to be a PDF) from the Canadian government and the experience left me feeling completely subjugated. The lengths that Adobe go to to make sure that you have the most frustrating experience possible is unbelieveable. Searching for alternatives or help leads you to either: be forced to buy their premium software (or a licensed equivalent) or subscribe for Adobe’s online tools. Why is this propriety format allowed in government forms? What is so fantastic/irreplaceable about this format?
Governments really should be forced to use open formats.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFA
“In 2017 the ISO Committee deprecated XFA from PDF 2.0.[4]”
Adobe is a bloated garbage company that hasn’t truly innovated in a decade, they’re just hoarding their proprietary tools and formats to squeeze as much money out of customers as possible.
Their CMS and their analytics are fucking awful. Such a convoluted mess. They make all the wrong decisions, and then criticize when you don’t use their recommended approach. They don’t even understand the basics of good website development, why would we follow their recommendations?
What is so fantastic/irreplaceable about this format?
Adobe profitting off your misery. That the Canadian govt is using it makes me think if the adoption was similar to how things usually happen down here in Brazil: new head of IT has a “great idea” (which he suspiciously got after meeting with a representative of a company) and demands it to be implemented ASAP. 3 months later, with everything needing the “great thing”, head of IT is dismissed from his position, everyone else hates the new thing, but now it’s completely rooted into half the digital workflows.
I work for the Canadian government, and these are horrible. They worm their way into everything. We are slaves to proprietary formats. There is very little will to switch to open standards for something like this.
I wish you the very best of luck climbing the ranks of your position and straightening this BS
Proprietary formats are certainly an issue outside of Canada.
Most of the reason corporations/governments stick with popular proprietary formats is actually money.
Developing/investigating an open format is expensive. and then there is the problem of people who have only lived in a digital walled garden.
If you have to train all of your new employees on how to use it the cost rises exponentially.
Then you have your IT support folks who probably just got it dumped in their lap at the last second, and have no knowledge of it themselves, because training wasn’t an option due to time or money.
As a person who handled (solo help desk for that shift) the change over of a health networks electronic medical records systems, I receive no training and was told that they had consultants on hand to transfer them to - yeah well in 4 hours over 2000 calls came in. And of course I got yelled at by a dick hole boss (if your adult children won’t speak to you, and you’ve never met your grandchildren, you are the problem) about people who didn’t want to wait in line for one person to answer the phone and dropped the call.
That boss was ultimately the reason I left that company in favor of a previous employer who offered a lot less problems. Stayed there until the pandemic (hospitality IT) and its been a shit show ever since.
We like to say “nobody ever gets fired for buying [Microsoft|Adobe|Oracle]”. Basically, if you buy shitty proprietary stuff from a company that is known for making shitty proprietary stuff, it’s not a surprise. If you take a risk on an open alternative, you are somehow staking your own reputation on the success of it. We’ve been burned countless times by the corporate software world, but we keep crawling back because nobody in the government (or most orgs) cares about software freedom.
Before you post a snappy “just do X” or “try this software” try it yourself consent-letter-2123.pdf my complaint is not trivial.
