Great comments and advice to all who helped me with this. I can't thank you enough!
I know HTML is the best way to go. I am in a unique situation. It's slow to change but I am working on it. :) Kevin -----Original Message----- From: li...@webstandardsgroup.org [mailto:li...@webstandardsgroup.org] On Behalf Of Chris Beer Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 7:15 AM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Cc: Erickson, Kevin (DOE) Subject: Re: [WSG] Document Formats Hi Kevin You're also touching on accessibility issues there, as well as gov business processes, legal requirements etc etc. One thing I thought worth raising and worth considering though is copyright - do you even have permission to alter the format of the document as submitted to you? US is different to us, I know, but something to keep in mind... We deal with multiple formats in my workplace constantly. Best approach we find, when you can, is HTML first, PDF for print as needed. We try to steer clear of using any file format that isn't an open standard (eg we don't use.xls when we can use .csv) etc as it can imply inferred support or approval for a vendor. Cheers Chris On 12/1/2010 6:52 AM, Erickson, Kevin (DOE) wrote: > Hi All, > The website I work with receives a lot of documents to be posted that > come in the form of Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents. And now, with > the release of the latest versions of Ms Office, they are coming to me > with an "X" on their extensions. I have information in the footer of all > the web pages for access to free viewers for all documents including > these latest extensions. This may be an adequate CYA but I am not > convinced it is the best practice. I know this must be confusing for > some of our visitors. > I would like to ask any of you if you have had to deal with multiple > document formats and how you handled this for the best user > accessibility. > I am thinking the best practice is to have, first, a browser/HTML > version, second, a PDF version, and after that whatever version the > document was created as, i.e. Ms Word, PowerPoint, etc. > Example: > <ul> > <li> > Title<a href="info.html" title"Title Web Page"> (Web > Page)</a> <a href="info.pdf" title"Title in PDF Format"> (PDF)</a> <a > href="info.docx" title"Title in MS Word Format"> (Word)</a> > </li> > </ul> > > Thank you very much for sharing your experiences on this, > > Kevin > > > > ******************************************************************* > List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm > Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org > ******************************************************************* > > ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
