Re: HTML And/Or PDF?

[Dan Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anyone who thinks it's better to read something of any complexity on-line
rather than in printed form is severely twisted, particularly when it's in
HTML or one of the WINHELP variants. Most of the junk you find on the web
and in on-line help documents is nothing but tricked-out shovelware that is
inferior to ordinary paper documents.

Eventually (perhaps sooner than you might expect), XML will offer
multi-column page layouts, superior formatting and linking, radically
improved information retrieval and information exchange capabilities (not
just between people, but also between software applications and different
platform types), and the capability to intermix many languages in the same
document (or even in the same paragraph), including languages used in
specific disciplines (e.g., musical and chemical notation, equations, and
much more). Most of these urgently-needed new features are well beyond the
capabilities of HTML, PDF, and all of that Winhelp-type junk.

The future is XML, and those who don't prepare for it now will be left in a
limbo from which they may never recover.

At 12:54 AM 5/20/99 -0400, browe@one.net wrote:
>I think you are missing the point of my original post, so I'll expand it in
>a less cranky, more informative form.
>
>It has been well established that when reading information from a monitor,
>both comprehension and retention are reduced by 30% (conservative figure)
>over reading the same information in printed form. A further reduction
>occurs (figures range from 5% to a whopping 40%, depending on the study)
>when the text is formatted in the flush-left,
>single-space-between-paragraphs, generic-system-fonts style that is almost
>unavoidable in HTML documents. The reason seems to be that people can't
>keep track of their place in the text, and end up skipping or re-reading
>lines; this breaks their concentration and irritates them. It gets worse
>with multi-screen documents.
>
>This secondary reduction, and a portion of the primary reduction,
>disappears when the text is formatted according to the conventional rules
>of typography for printed material in whatever language and culture is
>involved.  IOW, people understand more when the screen looks like a
>well-printed book.
>
>Now, the original enquirer in this thread was concerned with user
>documentation being converted from printed to online form. It follows that
>the point of this documentation is to convey information to users in a
>comprehensible and readable form. And if it is to be the only documentation
>they have, then it would be nice if it does the job well; if users are
>subliminally irritated every time they have to use it, they are going to be
>calling the help desk instead of looking things up for themselves. So
>something like Acrobat, with good, print-like formatting, would be
>preferable to straight HTML. 
>
>My real-world experience supports the experimental results. Most of the web
>sites I have maintained consist almost entirely of long documents. Over a
>couple of years I found that whenever someone commented on the sites, they
>were glad to have the information available there. BUT... almost uniformly
>they said that they didn't actually read the documents online; they saved
>the text, formatted them in their word-processors, and printed them out
>before even trying to read them in detail! What they did online was skim,
>reading a couple of lines and clicking "page down", and not really getting
>any information at all. There was a tremendous amount of time and effort
>wasted by personnel using the "online" documents that was not wasted with
>the preceding commercially-printed versions. This waste is why I'm so
>cranky about HTML -- and equally cranky towards people who try to defend it.
>
>This print-before-reading habit vanished when we converted the most-used
>documents to Acrobat. Personnel were sufficiently comfortable with the
>on-screen text that they never printed it out; they just kept an icon on
>their desktop for their most-used documents, and consulted it as needed.
>The savings and productivity increase the companies had expected finally
>arrived. Acrobat provides near-complete control over the visual
>presentation of the information, allowing it to be conveyed in the most
>effective form. 
>
>Josh
>
>
>
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>----------
>Josh Norton aka Benjamin Rowe -- browe@one.net
>
>What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a
>physical reality and a metaphysical one. . . . It's this in-between that
>I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world
>and the intangible one, which is really the realm of the artist. 
>-- Federico Fellini
>
>
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>    1999 FrameUsers Conference: http://www.FrameUsers.com/conference/
>     Dr. John Warnock Keynote on Adobe and the Future of FrameMaker
>_________________________________________________________________________
>
>
     ====================
     | Nullius in Verba |
     ====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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