Re: A prediction about the Presidential campaign

In the Year of the Golden Pig, the Great and Powerful Keith F. Lynch declared:
David Goldfarb <goldfarb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
(E.g., he asked a little while ago, "Why do people on the web use
PDF format when that format is grossly incompatible with the entire
installed base of character-cell terminals?" The obvious answer is,
"So few people use such terminals that they aren't worth bothering
about" and yet that never seemed to occur to him.)

Of course it occurred to me. Users of character-cell terminals or
terminal emulators may be in a minority, but it's not all that small a
minority. I think you may be guilty of exactly what you're accusing
me of -- you don't use one, so you assume almost nobody else does.

How many customers does a business want to alienate for no good
reason? Ten percent for this reason, twenty percent for that reason,
five percent for some third reason -- it quickly adds up.


You're talking about legacy systems from the earliest days of the Internet -- only a tiny fraction of current users were online back then, and only a tiny fraction of those haven't upgraded.

There are plenty of other bad things about PDF. For instance it's a
proprietary format, it's slow,

PDF was reversed engineered years ago. There are plenty of open source programs for creating PDFs, and if you don't like Adobe's software, you can use Foxit instead.

its files are bloated, and it overrides
a user's preferences as to font, font size, color, etc.


That's the point. PDFs are meant for cases where you need everyone to have identical copies of a document, so if someone points to something on page 34, it's on page 34 for everyone. It's also quite useful for filling out forms -- you need to go to the DMV, visit their website first, find the form you'll need, fill it out, and print.



--
Sean O'Hara <http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com>
Veronica: Come on. Ruined lives? Bloodshed? You really think a relationship should be that hard?
Logan: No one writes songs about the ones that come easy.
--Veronica Mars
.

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