[LINK] Government gives thumbs down to PDF format

[Fernando Cassia]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Darrell Burkey
<darrell.burkey at anu.edu.au> wrote:
> . I
> can't stand HTML as the line spacing, kerning, line breaks, fonts etc
> are all over the place.

Strange considering that HTML has -until now- saved us from enduring
each "designer"´s choice of weird fonts. And thank the heavens that
schemes to embed fonts in web pages have failed. That way people can
concentrate on information rather than "look at this cool font I´ve
used here".

> Give me pdf any day for a document. I think it's one of the most
> brilliant advancements in online publishing ever!

For publishing long documents online for later download and reading, yes.

For general information reading / browsing on-line, nothing beats the
flexibility of HTML.

>Death to HTML and all it's evilness (although it's great for all the dribble on Wordpress web
> sites).

Did HTML kill any of your relatives? made you sick? HTML standarized
hypertext (links) and offers the least common denominator of text
attributes (bold, italic, underline, font familie, text size), that
allows information sharing between different systems and devices
effortlessly.

By repudiating HTML you´re in fact saying that the web sucks. Those
pixel-perfect jihadists that demand "absolute positioning" and
pixel-perfect fonts are what brought the menace of Flash to the
otherwise open and standarized web.

And as a result we have nowadays "web sites" that are no web sites at
all, but an empty HTML frame with a big freaking Flash aplet inside,
that loads and read "this web site is optimized for 1024x768, running
Flash 10" and with an annoying background music track that often
cannot be turned off.

I have a few dozen of those Flash horror examples for you to check
out, if you don´t believe me.... but hey those "Flash sites" have
perfect positioning of every pixel and the "designer" can show off his
"Caligary 77" font with Egyptian hieroglyphs and an upside-down "r".
(the last example has been made up for dramatic punch). Way to go!.

FC