[LINK] Government gives thumbs down to PDF format

[Fernando Cassia]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 11:46 PM, Marghanita da Cruz
<marghanita at ramin.com.au> wrote:

> Not to mention Hyperlinks - pretty soon PDF will be exactly
> like HTML and PDF readers as fully functional as Browsers.
>
> Marghanita

What has made the web what it is today is its _openness_. PDF files,
while the file format specification might be open, on the other hand,
are BINARY BLOBS. You can´t manually edit them with a text editor,
press CTRL-U like you do on a web browser and see the "source code" of
that given page you were seeing. Nor can you see and read about the
placement of different elements on the page on a binary DF like you do
with a web (HTML) file.

That is, without using specialized software.

I´m all for PDF, for long term long-document storage (anything above a
handful of pages), but a replacement for html and the web? forget it.
Won´t happen.

FC