RE: Nielsen's Rating

Subject: RE: Nielsen's Rating
From: "Buss, Jason A" <jabuss -at- cessna -dot- textron -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 14:11:30 -0500

I read through the article, and it seems the author's primary contention
does have merit:

"PDF is great for distributing documents that need to be printed. But that
is all it's good for. No matter how tempting it might be, you should never
use PDF for content that you expect users to read online."

Now, I would also like to point out to "pundits" such as Nielsen that the
quickest way to be proven wrong (eventually) when discussing technology is
to use a word like "never"...

PDF is great for distributing static documents over the web. It's great for
printing documents over the web. I personally don't think web developers
give enough thought to what happens to their content when it spools out of a
printer (I do print out a lot of things that get the right margin lopped
off, and it's irritating as hell).

Where the distinction lies is the thought of looking for a "document" over
the web as opposed to looking for "data" over the web. Document implies
pagination, formatting, headers and footers, and the like, while data is
just that: information. There are plenty of things that just seem better
served as PDFs as opposed to markup: marketing brochures, manuals, white
papers, scanned documentation, and documentation that must preserve it's
physical appearance for whatever reason (such as legal documents).

But when you are building, categorizing, and organizing a large body of
information for easy digestion, I still feel people benefit best from HTML
(or XML, as the case may be). Sites that offer more than marginal
interaction from the user (web based mail, e-commerce, sites with enormous
inventories to display) are also best served by markup and the accompanying
scripting languages, management systems, and such.

Even with sites that offer large bodies of documentation in PDF format, they
are usually indexed from an HTML page (the gateway that Nielsen often
referred to). Can anyone think of an example of a website with a startpage
of index.pdf?

Also, a consideration to the online viewing (as opposed to printing) of
documentation is file size. Tell your sysadmin you are wanting to replace
all those 5 and 10k HTML files with 150-200k PDFs, and he'll most likely
tell you what you can do with your PDFs. And if you have any enormous PDF
files for downloading (1meg+), don't count on any interest from anyone using
dial-up connections (about 90% of consumer web users). In addition, what
about those who send "documents" to wireless phones, PDAs, ect? More
markup.

As far as upgrading Reader goes, of course people are going to be more apt
to upgrade their browser as opposed to upgrading reader. That's just math;
Web=90% HTML, 5% PDF, 5% miscellaneous crap. Most people can get a CD with
the latest browsers from their ISP for free anyway, so there's rarely any
need to download a browser anymore.

The final reasons HTML (and XML) will continue to be more popular on the web
than PDF. Price and ease of use. Anyone can learn HTML. Technically,
anyone can learn to write Postscript and PDF too, but that smacks of the
argument that anyone could learn neurosurgery with enough practice and a few
"volunteers". PDF files are typically created using Adobe Acrobat. List
price from Adobe's web store: $249. HTML files can be (and always used to
be) created using any text editor. List price: $0. Without Acrobat, you
can still create beautiful PDF documents. Open one in any text editor, and
use it to teach yourself how to create PDF documents. FUN. Or use some of
the handy scripting tools. Don't know programming? Shameful...

HTML will always have the advantage of being first, being free, and being
easy to use. It's that "lowest common denominator" thing. I really do fail
to see the point in the "non-literate vs. literate on the web" argument.
What exactly does this have to do with PDF vs. HTML? The book "Thinking in
Java" Bruce Eckel can be read and downloaded in HTML, PDF, and Word97
format. So are you proposing that the non-literate person would read the
HTML documents, and the literate person would download the PDF and print it
out? Are we assuming there are amazing nuggets of knowledge that burst from
the PDF that just cannot be rendered in HTML, even with the exact same
verbiage? The early adopters of the web were academics, and to this day,
most of them still mark up their data as opposed to PDFing. I am just not
seeing how insulting the general populace reinforced any argument for or
against any web delivery technology. Unless it was just a contempt for the
public at large, which still seems silly. I read through 2-3 newspapers in
the average day. All online. In HTML.

In fact, the people who Dan railed against (the general populace) probably
contribute just as much content to the web as business, government, and
academia. While the dot-com crapout shakes the majority of these companies
free of the solvent coil, the personal content will live on. People with
something to say (or share) will do so irregardless of how they feel the
rest of the world will perceive it's merit. While there is plenty of
flotsam and jetsam out on the web, it's much more cozy than if the web were
dominated by business. Or government. There isn't a great idea in the
world that a marketing department or legislative body couldn't ruin.

If you think HTML was a "return to the dark ages of publishing"... well I
guess that depends on the perception of the "dark ages"; If a lack of
perfect pagination, eloquent typesetting, and optimized page design is the
dark ages, fair enough. If the dark ages of publishing was having to leave
the home or office to purchase or borrow these parcels of knowledge, forever
searching for just the right resource, browsing through to hope you get the
best one, and either plunking down cash for the volume, or returning it in a
couple of weeks... I think you know where I'm getting at. Imagine the
sheer amount of currency you would have had to part with to glean all the
information that has become readily available.

Sacrificing some control of formatting and pagination to deliver information
to any and every CPU in the free world? Seems like a fair trade to me.

-Jason

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