I hope the old saw about April showers bringing May flowers is really true. For most of this week, it felt like someone might need to get going on building an ark here soon. Today at long last, there has been a bit of sun. All the little crocuses in my garden suddenly opened in response. (Maybe they were just surprised.)
All the rainy weather has made it a bit harder to be motivated to do anything. However, I am diligently working on the spring issue of Computor Companion. Yesterday, I took my laptop upstairs for a change of scene and got my articles done. I’m still waiting for one more article, which was mildly delayed, but I’m sure it will be here shortly…hint, hint 😉
In more nerdy news, earlier this week I was talking to someone at a PR company about why I think Web site pages should be in HTML format and not PDF. An unfortunate trend appears to be transpiring in the online world. Sometimes you’ll click a link and suddenly discover “oh no, it’s a PDF!” as Acrobat and Internet Explorer start grinding away trying to get the page to display.
It seems like more and more people developing Web sites just assume that “everyone” has Acrobat and high-speed broadband. I have both and yet I still find it screamingly annoying to discover a link is a PDF only after I have clicked it and wonder what is happening.
The thing is that PDF files are not really designed for use on the Internet. They are generally large, and as the person I was talking to asked, “when it comes to the Web, you have to wonder if PDF stands for Pretty Dumb File?”
PDF really stands for Portable Document Format and the whole point of PDF files is to make a document look like the original application file for printing and viewing. The files are large because they include fonts and other information that mostly applies if you are printing the document. Large files of any sort aren’t good to force feed people online because you never know what type of system the person is using who visits a Web site.
Just as with movie or audio files, I think that links to PDFs should be labeled as such, so if you don’t want to wait for Acrobat to figure itself out, you don’t have to. If I’m interested in a PDF file, I prefer to right-click on the link, and save it to my hard disk, so I can just deal with it later.