Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes:
PDF is *very* vendor-specific and proprietary. Who sets the
standards for PDF? I remember there used to be discussions
here if the RFC's should be published in PDF also. It's
always rejected of course, even if PDF is probably the best
standard you can get for a formated document (better than
postscript that it was derrived from). So you may want to ask
people for Postscript there if you are really that centric
about open standards. :-)
Postscript is no different, it is a proprietary format but one the IETF
has in the past used for standards and still accepts as a secondary -
despite the fact postscript support is no longer ubiquitous.
The advantage of PDF is that it preserves the exact appearance of the
original document, and that it is designed to be a final format, that
is, it is not designed to be editable (and editing PDF is difficult,
deliberately so). Also, PDF readers of some kind are available for
just about every conceivable platform, and they all work extremely
well. PDF documents also tend to print very well, too. This is why
the printing industry long ago adopted PDF (and PDF was designed for
that industry). I'm not aware of any other format that is as reliable
for preserving the format of a printed document and as portable.
HTML was intended to be an email format and works well as an email
format. Javascript on the other hand...
HTML is a Web format, not an e-mail format. And unlike PDF, HTML does
not guarantee any particular presentation at the receiving end, since
the receiving software must interpret the HTML. HTML gives
suggestions, not absolute rules as PDF does, which means that HTML may
look nothing like the author intended.
I keep my e-mail programs set to disable HTML for both sending and
receiving. I don't need fancy formatting in e-mail. If I truly wish
to send something that is nicely formatted, I send PDF.
I take the view that this is a technology business and if people don't
like new technology they probably have less to contribute than they
imagine.
The same is true of people who use technologies just for the sake of
using technologies. They are mostly geeks, with a poor grasp of the
real world of end users who see technology as a tool, not as an end in
itself.
--
Anthony
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