IT FIGURES THAT two consultants would favor Adobe Acrobat's PDF over HTML (Expert Tips, December '95, page 136). After all, with HTML anyone who has even the lowest-end machine and the software that came with it can create a useful, content-rich Web page, and most pages can be viewed easily using a 14.4-kbps modem and inexpensive hardware.
Instead your experts would rather that PDF files were used, for which you need a $200 program just to produce the PDF file and T1 links and high-end graphics workstations just to download and view the pages in any reasonable amount of time. Once you've downloaded the pages, you'll get the same content-free, style-over-form presentation that passes for most advertising these days.
There are already enough outlets for graphic designers to show off their avant-garde designs. The World Wide Web is a place to provide a large amount of searchable content with just enough style to make it presentable. Admittedly, not every page achieves this, but there's no reason to think that using PDFs will change that.
Brian L. Matthews
via the Internet
/ It's not clear to us what consulting status has to do with recommending a document-design strategy, since we don't sell Adobe Acrobat or T1 lines (or anything else, for that matter). Nonetheless, we consider your comments sufficiently Luddite to want to respond.
You're right that it's possible to create pages with oodles of content, using very inexpensive tools. And it's true that HTML allows us to create Web documents that look reasonable and that download faster than Acrobat-based pages. However, it's also true that the restrictions imposed by HTML cause many people to look beyond it as a document-delivery strategy.
To say that "the Web is a place to provide a large amount of searchable content with just enough style to make it presentable" is to condemn the future to the technological limitations of the past. Why don't we just stick with text-only newsgroups? Plenty of content there, and who's to say that paragraph indents and capital letters don't provide that "just enough style" you're asking for?
We are not willing to discard centuries of art and typography just because the current state of network technology and modem speeds happens to make them temporarily inconvenient to use. / CW & BS
