Re: Adobe's PDF

fortuity!kehoe@uu6.psi.com (Daniel Miles Kehoe)
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 93 13:09:03 -0700
From: fortuity!kehoe@uu6.psi.com (Daniel Miles Kehoe)
Message-id: <9307192009.AA00665@fortuity.sf.ca.us>
To: kevin@scic.intel.com (Kevin Altis)
Subject: Re: Adobe's PDF
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Status: RO
Kevin Altis makes the point

> While PDF has promise, it has a completely different focus than the 

> Web right now, specifically presentation instead of structured 

> documents.

Yes, very true. PDF and WWW will be used differently. HTML is  
suitable for structured documents. PDF is suitable (Adobe tells us)  
for cross-platform exchange of unstructured documents.

There may be times we want to include unstructured documents within  
an HTML document. For example, drawings or maps. Or documents that  
were created in applications that don't translate to HTML. 


Is PDF suitable? There will be questions of performance. There may be  
insurmountable technical problems (e.g., how does a WWW browser  
handle Multiple Master font rendering).

But we might consider accomodating PDF, if it allows us to bring in  
documents from many diverse origins, especially if it allows us to  
bounce out of the unstructured "presentation" document to the wider  
web of HTML documents (through a hyperlink, if the PDF link  
annotation were extended to accomodate URL/URNs and a browser could  
handle this). It's worth exploring.

Regards,
Daniel Kehoe

P.S. Kevin's consideration of interface elements was also very  
intriguing.