Very true. I myself have never had a case where what I want to display is
EXACTLY the ONLY way I want to display it. I understand the tremendous
advantage the PDF[1] format provides when someone already has printed work
they want to distribute (it's great for game companies that resell old
titles for $10 because they convert the manuals to PDF and save major
production / distribution cost, for example). I also use the PDF versions of
IBM's product docs on a near-daily basis.
Personally, though, I absolutely hate going to a website to find that it
works great when I look at it from work on IE, but horrible (or even
unviewable) when I see it from home on NS. Or even more irritating is when a
site looks perfect at 800x600 but poorly formatted at 1280x1024 (or vise
versa), or if I want to shut graphics off or (heaven forbid!) over-ride the
fonts / colors of a web page and it becomes completely useless. I find the
XML / XSL combination to be a fantastic tool for the way I like to present
and have presented to me. It allows good customization and the ability to
ensure your material is presented fairly accurate to your intentions, while
still allowing the user a degree of personal control. I guess I would call
it PDC format (Pretty Darn Close).
-Larry
-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Scott [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 9:29 AM
Subject: RE: Open Formats (was ZD on Linux)
<SNIP>
Of course it does. You are using XML for what *it* was intended
for -- to
generate multiple presentations from the same data. But if you (for
example)
wanted to take your printed format, and distribute that in such a
way that it
was viewable and/or printable by as many people as possible, while
at the same
time maintaining the highest possible level of accurate
reproduction, than PDF
[1] would be a better choice. :-)
Footnotes
---------
[1] When I say "PDF", you could also use another page description
language,
like PostScript, with similar effect.
</SNIP>
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