3 ms·
I guess the fact that in the age of mobile-first responsive content this guy decides to publish as word-exported-to-pdf tells you everything you need to know ab
by mangecoeur 11y ago
I guess the fact that in the age of mobile-first responsive content this guy decides to publish as word-exported-to-pdf tells you everything you need to know about his ideas of "good user experience"
- paulddraper 11y agoI'm sympathetic to your point. But publishing in the Portable Document Format isn't the worst.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoSomething can be unacceptable without necessarily being the worst possible case.
- paulddraper 11y agoTrue, let me rephrase. Publishing something in the Portable Document Format (particularly on a non-web subject) is not unacceptable. HTML is nice, but it does have its drawbacks. For example, HTML doesn't have pagination or standard TOC support. It's hypermedia, so you have to link out to a bunch of other files, making it much more cumbersome to transmit and distribute. Using a zip, I suppose? (Yes, you can use data URIs in HTML5 compliant viewers, for inflated sizes, and mandatory full file reads before rendering.) I probably wouldn't have done a PDF either, but I think you're reading more into it then you can.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoOK, we shouldn't get too hung up on this; "unacceptable" is obviously hyperbolic! I won't bother with a point-by-point rebuttal, just summarise by saying that this is clearly a blog post, and PDF is completely wrong for a blog post. For the author to get something relating to usability so fundamentally wrong in a post about usability just entirely undermines their argument.
- paulddraper 11y agoYou know what, on second thought, you're right. Given the context and content, it's pretty ironic.
- jff 11y agoHe considers this a "whitepaper", rather than the more accurate "blog post" (see the Documents section on his website)