Why a digital document is a piece of software, and what that means for your freedom - TDF Community Blog

Most people, including many competent software developers, think of a digital document the way they think of a sheet of paper: an inert object that holds words and pictures, indifferent to the tool used to open it. This intuition is wrong, and the consequences of getting it wrong shape everything from vendor lock-in to cybersecurity to the long-term readability of public records. A digital document is not paper. It is a piece of software. The HTML parallel The clearest way to see this is to think about a web page. When you visit a website, your browser receives a file – an HTML document – and executes it. It parses the markup, applies styling rules, runs embedded scripts, fetches additional resources, and assembles the result into something you can read. The page you see on screen is not a static image transmitted from the server, it is the output of a small program that your browser ran on your behalf. Nobody disputes that a web browser is software. Yet the HTML file it consumes is also, in a meaningful sense, software: a set of instructions describing what should happen when the file is opened. Change the instructions, and the rendered