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PDF vs HTML

``` Date: 27 May 1995 05:20:52 GMT From: fritz@rodin.wustl.edu (Fritz Lehmann) Newsgroups: comp.text.pdf,alt.hypertext,comp.text.sgml,comp.infosystems.www.misc Subject: Re: Summary, was Crux, was PDF vs HTML Organization: Center for Optimization and Semantic Control, Washington University

Jorn Barger asked: ---begin quote--- Is anybody willing to summarize this thread? ---end quote---

My attempt to summarize it is:

1. HTML and SGML are "markup" languages which means that they "mark" a portion of text as referring to a particular kind of information, such as ADDRESS, TITLE, etc. They do not specify how this is to be interpreted; that is up to the browser/reader (or even speaker) software, and is usually configurable by the user. Netscape committed the sin of impurity with "blink" because this does prescribe how its content is to be presented. (Hence the question of how reader-for-the-blind software would handle "blink" text.)

2. PDF is a format for Adobe's Acrobat software; it seeks to provide a platform-independent and printer-independent way of presenting the same picture on many different machines. (There are some others like this too.)

3. Many in the graphic arts, advertising, publishing, games, etc. fields add value specifically by crafting a particular presentation. If you take an advertisement and alter the fonts, colors, layout, etc., you have destroyed the work of the graphic artists, even if you have preserved the work of the copy writers.

4. Many in these presentation-oriented fields saw the World Wide Web as an exciting new medium for publication. They liked the ability to include graphics. The advertising potential is tremendous.

5. To their dismay, they have now found that WWW is not quite what they had in mind. That is because in HTML the only way to maintain total control (or at least maximal control) is to send the whole page as one picture, uninterpreted in any way as HTML or even as text.

6. WWW exists to help the user. As much as possible, what the user wants the user gets. This is inherently incompatible with the goals of advertisers, brand-name users, gamesters, et al., which are to create a certain visual effect under their direct control. They need a medium which obeys the provider, not the user. Hence PDF, which gives the provider control of the appearance, with no choices left to the user.

7. If your chief relationship to the user is helping a willing user by providing information that he or she wants, then WWW/HTML is good. If your chief relationship is influencing a user and getting him or her to want something or to feel a certain way, through your presentation skills, then WWW/HTML may not be what you want.

8. The success of WWW means that most people in the "controlled presentation" faction are not content to walk off and use their own alternative; they want to change WWW itself to make it a provider- dominated medium which they can control. WWW/HTML/SGML experts and purists then have to explain patiently (over and over again) that HTML/SGML are fundamentally not graphic page and screen description languages. They are closer to semantic networks (as used in Artificial Intelligence) restricted to a narrow domain with an ordering convention (so-called "text").

9. A few who do realize this say, OK, let's use PDF instead of HTML.

Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann ```

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