Here’s another of my beefs: publishing PDF on the web is lazy, bad practice.
PDF – portable document format – what does that mean? It means, here’s what you want to print … in a file. It’s a portable print format; not a native web document format and not an open document format. It looks pretty, but is substantially dumb. You can create TOCs and embed links and annotations etc but almost all the document structure and semantics is lost, subverted to the holy grail of print replication.
Most often PDF is published on the web because it’s convenient and no hassle to do so. We’ve authored a pretty Word (or other) doc; we’ll print it to PDF and publish it on the web; it looks good … job done!
It looks good, but how does it feel? If you want to navigate it or extract meaning from it, it feels bad. There’s a place, a big place, for PDF, but it’s no substitute for an open web format which can be rich with meaning.
In the US Adobe is touting its technologies as good for open government; but Adobe is Bad for Open Government; bad for open anything.
