Although late to this discussion I too am enjoying it. I work for a NZ Govt Agency and just recently our request for an additional person has been granted and we now have a person who will work with the publishers of all legislative documents and magazines that our organisation produces to convert them into standards compliant HTML. [you could have knocked me over with a feather when we got the go ahead!]
It has taken some time and a number of knock backs but we got there. ALL PDF documents made available to the public will be marked up into HTML and offered as the primary document with a link to the pdf for printing. We are in the early stages of this and it's a big job as we have heaps of documents but in the end I think it is important to be a good net citizen. Presentations from people with disabilities have been real eye-openers and I try to take as many of our team along as I can so that they can learn. Right now I mark up links to pdf files as an unordered list and style it with a class that uses a pdf icon in place of the bullet. - document name [pdf - file size and number of pages] We also offer to mail the document out in hard copy on request and provide a telephone number for any requests for information. Someone last year coined the term 'creatures from the black lagoon' when refering to pdf files. They were partially sighted and the pdf file was incomprehensible as they tried to navigate through it on zoom. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michael MD Sent: Friday, 20 July 2007 12:58 p.m. To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: please avoid forcing people to open pdf in browser! was Re: [WSG] To target or not > I'm all about "web conventions." I didn't realize having a blank > target didn't follow web standards. Is that documented somewhere? > This one still bothers me ... The alternatives I've seen invariably require javascript and some of those javascript methods give the user less choice and are also not well suited for user-generated content (often created with wysiwyg editors) I'm seeing a very annoying trend lately where quite a few sites are forcing pdf's to open in a new browser window with javascript. I do not think it is acceptable to force people to wait over a minute with a locked up browser for a slow plugin to start without warning! - at least give them the option to right-click and download it for offline viewing! (or better don't use pdf - use html! ) Government-related sites seem to be the worst offenders - They seem to have almost everything as pdf Until they fix browsers to not lock up while loading slow plugins or they fix acrobat reader to start more quickly I'll continue to regard sites that force people to view pdfs in a browser as being about on about the same level as those nasty porn sites with endless chains of popup windows. ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
