9 Dec
2008
9 Dec
'08
1:44 p.m.
Doc Shipley wrote:
Bottom line is, you can't really blame the
format/doc type for misuse.
I promise I can screw up an ASCII document just as badly as any
text-based PDF, and I can make HTML behave even worse. If you don't
understand the tools you use, it doesn't matter which tool it is. Your
product will suck.
But then the tools can be to blame, if they introduce a large amount of
overhead into even the simplest files (akin to expecting MS Word to save good
HTML, I suppose)
That's where I dislike the ubiquitous use of PDF - in that for simple jobs,
where you just need a few paragraphs of text and maybe an image or two, it
seems to be quite a heavyweight format (ditto for the tools needed to display
it). Unfortunately I don't think there's any real alternative, and possibly
never has been (RTF, perhaps, but was that ever really an agreed standard?)
cheers
Jules