On 4/4/04 11:35 pm, in article
[email hidden], "Simon Brooke"
Quoted message said:in message <[email hidden]>, Ian
Smith (') said:Simon Brooke said:Dearly beloved, what is 'a document'? Why does the
precise rendition of it matter two hoots?
For lots of reasons, many of which have been supplied to
you as examples, all of which you have chosen, in your
perverseness, to ignore.
No-one but you is advocating using a medium unsuited to
its role. You, with your insistence on using html
regardless of how suited it is, are.
I didn't (and don't) advocate HTML for any purpose
unsuited to its role. In fact, these days I rarely use it.
But it is at least a relatively compact structured
document standard with tagged elements capable of being
addressed and handled intelligently by a parser, and even
people who don't deal with documents professionally are
familiar with the browsers' ability to intelligently adapt
(well constructed) HTML documents to the user's
presentational preferences and needs.
So my printers needs are ' I want this document to appear
exactly as my client envisaged'. HTML doesn't do that. It
encodes document content in a relatively poorly structured
manner with hints as to how it should be presented.
PDF encodes content *and presentation* in the one document.
Very useful where presentation is important.
HTML is useful for dynamic information transfer and thrives
best where absolute precision in layout is not important,
but information content is.
PDF works best when thought of as 'camera ready electronic
copy'. In Guy's case, he could put the pages up as HTML
which would be a pain to download (as you'd need to capture
every image as well), difficult to ensure that the notes
appear on the same page as the slide, and generally a pain.
PDF works much better for this purpose.
Quoted message said:Obviously in the general case XML or SGML are better
answers, but (except in very rare and exceptional
circumstances) if PDF is the answer you asked the wrong
question.
That's very arrogant. If you are too small minded to
envisage situations where PDF is an appropriate solution (ie
the kind of situations many of us come across in the course
of our work) then that is your problem, but don't foister
your lack of vision on us.
..d
