Re: Accessible PDFs?

> By "forbidding" the creation of PDFs as the primary means of distribution
> large institutions can avoid this haphazard "rush" to publishing
> (POSTING!!!) content to their web sites.  There may be times when PDF *is*

A lot of the commercially saleable skills in "web site design" are about
getting HTML to behave more like PDF.  Authors will not significantly
improve just because PDF is banned.  In the medium term, they will
move to SVG (which, unless generated in the browser with something like
XLST) will have less structure than properly tagged PDF.

(In many cases, I find that the HTML documents should have been done
in PDF (to meet the authors wants) and the PDF documents would have made
very good HTML documents if it weren't for the lack of vector graphics
in HTML.  Static SVG could make a difference there, but the effort is
going elsewhere in SVG development, and I suspect one reason why the
informative documents are in PDF is that only the marketing department
is allowed to play with newer tools.

On most web sites, I seek out the PDF documents, as the ones that are likely
to contain real information.)

Received on Monday, 2 December 2002 16:18:40 UTC