Re: HTML vs. Adobe Acrobat

[Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM]

      However, you've lost some extensibility and audience by not
      converting to HTML.  To what extent you've lost it depends upon the
      content and purpose of your documents, but the fact remains that
      far more Web users use Netscape than they do Acrobat Reader.

That doesn't make much sense. It's rather like saying you've lost audience
because you've put your graphics in a format that can only be read by a
helper application.

Adobe's reader is freely available and easily installed. If it's a concern,
just drop a link to Adobe's download page on your page (almost everyone who
posts .PDF files does this). Netscape and Acrobat aren't mutually
exclusive. Most browsers (including Netscape) will use Acrobat as a helper
application, with no more effort than any other helper application.

Adobe even has a plug-in for Netscape that will read Acrobat files one page
at a time off a web server. And Netscape has an agreement to build Acrobat
technology into Netscape. (In fact, now that Netscape and MS are extending
HTML in mutually exclusive directions, I wonder if sometime in the future
PDF might not not replace HTML as the lingua franca of the web.)

There are some legitimate objections that can be made to Acrobat. Loss of
audience, however, is not one of them.


Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 124

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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