Re: Petitioning ISWC to allow Web friendly formats

[I don't want to get into a debate, but I would like to clarify a few
things]


On 5/7/13 5:01 AM, "Pascal Christoph" <christoph@hbz-nrw.de> wrote:
>Any "official standards body, government regulation" that would state
>that "PDF
>is as Web friendly as HTML and friends" is plainly misinforming.

"Web Friendly" is a term that you are making up - it has no normative
definition that anyone (except yourself) can base a discussion on.  If you
use the terms that are already defined and in use - Open Web or Open Web
Platform - then PDF is very much a part of that.  It meets 100% of the
criteria.


>PDF is maybe best for printing. It is not good for websites.

I don't believe I ever stated that PDF should be used to build a
(complete) website.  I agree, that would be stupid. In the same vein, I
wouldn't recommend building an entire site of JPEGs or PNGs, SVG or MathML
- yet all of those are also technologies used as part of the Open Web. PDF
can be used in the same way.


>And considering the PDF feature of "loading the first site" (which is
>still not streaming, btw.) being possible than more than 10 years: why is
>this
>not the standard when creating PDFs?

That's a question you would need to ask the developer/vendor behind the
PDF tools that you've chosen.  Adobe's tools, for example, have had that
option turned on (by default) for at least a decade - so every PDF
produced using an Adobe product is "Fast Web Enabled".


>Note, even if it were standard, it is
>still not stream based. What is with all the unix processing tools? Using
>PDF
>is, at last, harder.

As to the streaming point - (X)HTML isn't necessary streamable either.
Depending on how the content is structured, the use of external
references, scripts, etc. it may not be possible to process a given "web
page" entirely in stream.  This point is also one of the reasons why HTML
isn't considered a document format, but instead is considered a content
format.  Document formats - PDF, ODF, OOXML, EPUB, etc. - all use a
structured storage system that isn't designed to be processed as a stream
in order to enable more complex (and random) access.

Leonard

Received on Tuesday, 7 May 2013 12:51:05 UTC