Re: Adobe's PDF
roy@mchip00.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 93 16:38:02 -0400
Message-id: <9307202038.AA27953@mchip00.med.nyu.edu>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
From: roy@mchip00.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Subject: Re: Adobe's PDF
Status: RO
>There are many other concerns related to document interchange than those
>being addresss by the WWW community. The presentation of the document
>is paramount to many publishers and they would not consider the use of
>something like HTML/+ to distribute their publications.
I really do have to agree with this. HTML is the kind of thing that can
only be loved by a computer scientist. Yes, it expresses the underlying
structure of a document, but documents are more than just structured text
databases; they have visual impact. HTML totally eliminates any visual
creativity that a document's designer might have. Sort of like newspeak.
Saying "This text file doubleplus unpretty. Leave, redo, return when
complete" may get the message accross, but it hardly has the flair and
nuance of "This document looks like shit -- get out of here and don't come
back until it's completely redone!"