Slashdot Mirror
Unipage - A PDF Alternative?
A reader writes: "Unipage recently released a beta version of its Unipage Unifier.
The Unipage encoding is a way to encode a full page with its images, CSS, Javascript, Flash, and whatnot, into just one HTML file.
The 'Unipage Unifier' program instantly turns any online or local page into a 'Unipage' that can be viewed directly in a browser.
It saves the mess of files when you normally save a complete web page, but maybe the bigger scoop is that now people can use 'Unipages' to send content rich documents instead of PDF. But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything normally possible in a web page. Together with any program that can export into HTML you can get fully styled, dynamic, portable documents instantly.
And it's free." Good luck taking down the installed base of PDF.
No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. Lame.
- Support vector-based documents, allowing both text and graphics to scale to any size?
- Provide a way to cryptographicly sign a document?
- Attempt to tackle the "portable" in PDF? Are you kidding me? It looks like a Windows-only download.
- Support e-book DRM features?
- etc, etc...
Actually, nowhere on the product's website do they claim to be a "PDF killer". It just looks like an independent developer's attempt to make a cool little (beta) application. Interesting, but I'm left to wonder why I'm reading about this on the front page of Slashdot? Not to mention IE has this functionality for years.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Of course, had you bothered to research the subject, you'd know that PDF has supported animations and scripting with JavaScript within a document for many years now. I'm not saying the Unipage won't be useful thing. But to claim it's superior to PDF in areas where it's clearly not isn't going to help its cause. Not only that, but the two products have different goals anyway. PDF is, and I suspect will remain, the best way to send a document where the design and layout is important. It should render the same on all PDF viewers, and can contain richer formatting than can be expressed in HTML/CSS. A Unipage will probably be easier to author[1] than a complex PDF, but will only accurately preserve content, not formatting. Use whichever one is right for the task at hand. If anything, I'd say it's more of a rival to Word documents than PDFs.
[1] In fact, I suspect that will be its major selling point. Although you can do wonderful things with PDF, most people don't because a) they don't know about them, and b) the Adobe authoring tools are expensive, and hence not widespread.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Nothing really new and has nothing to do with PDF...
In Firefox, you can use Mozilla Archive Format extension, which can also save pages in Internet Explorer's MHTML format, to do the same thing.
Besides, as it is said in Wikipedia, the reason for PDF is to render exactly the same regardless of its origin or destination and they are most appropriately used to encode the exact look of a document in a device-independent way. Unipage suffers from the common problem of webpages rendering differently in different browsers.
Adobe has recently released its Intelligent Document Platform which gives PDFs the ability to use javascript and imbed things within their PDFs, along with the ability to use submission and make PDFs dynamic on the web.
And considering that Adobe recently purchased Macromedia, its only a matter of time before they have flash embedded and working solidly in PDFs.
Unipage is already waaay behind (like Hemos said, they don't have the solid installbase), and will have to come up with something extremely impressive that Adobe won't be able to copy.
I see this as vaporware before it even comes to release 1.0.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Viruses)
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
It certainly sounds cool, but not a PDF killer.
Changa hates change.
There's already a perfectly good standard for this -- MIME-encapsulated HTML or MHTML. It also has the advantage of being implemented in that little browser with 85% marketshare, Internet Explorer.
The Mozilla bug for implementing this is 40873, not that voting for it seems to do any good (bug is still 'NEW' after almost 6 years).
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
It's already easy to embed things into a single file with Gecko-based browsers (e.g. SeaMonkey, Firefox, etc) - all you'd have to do is grab the data that makes up the various files in the page (images, swfs, etc) and use "data:" URLs. For an example of a page that already embeds some images directly into the HTML, view this page with a Gecko-based browser. If you look at the source, you'll see some images inlined right into the HTML. I'd imagine it would not be difficult to make an extension that does what Unipage is currently doing. If all the content is hosted on the same domain, you could probably do it almost trivially in the page itself with some XMLHttpRequests to fetch the contents of images and other objects and inline them into document.innerHTML before saving it to a file.
My server
If it's based on HTML it can do horrendously-ugly-maths much better than LaTeX.
You say that as if it were necessarily a good thing.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Voting on Mozilla bugs never does anything. It's opium for the masses - it gives you the feeling that you can do something and make a difference, but it's really just a convenient way for the developers to channel user input into an area where it's easy to ignore.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
And what happens when the person viewing the Unipage doesn't have the fonts installed that are specified in the Unipage, like because they're viewing on a different (eg. OS) platform than that used to create the Unipage? That's the original design goal of PDF ("Portable Document Format).
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make install -not war
Umm no. Have you ever seen the power of the math package on LaTeX? I can create horrendously complicated expressions? HTML? You probably mean Math ML - this depends on browser support, and, (you guessed it), rendering depends on the browser.
As others pointed out - you lose the whole "looks same everywhere" aspect once you move away from DVI, PS and PDF. I mean for crying out loud - you have to put *hacks* in your CSS just to get the same page looking right between IE and Mozilla-based browsers. This isn't a solution.
Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything normally possible in a web page
Superior or different? This looks quite nice, but how can one compare this with PDF? This is just... something different.
PDF is a "portable document format". A way to port a (static) document so that it will be viewed and printed identically everywhere.
HTML is a way of describing documents so that they can be viewed and interacted with on a lot of platforms. It will NOT look the same on all platforms, it will NOT print well on all platforms (as a matter of fact, it will probably print very poorly on most platforms)
Different goals, different products. Why is that everyone wants the "do-it-all" product?
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Krazy Kat Online
Write boring code, not shiny code!
PDF is effectively worthless as a single page format... this is the webs domain.
The CSS committee has attempted to tackle pagination for ages... guess what... it doesn't work... it's aweful, it'll be years before it's even close to ok.
Let me point out that Opera, Mozilla, Netscape 4.X, Internet Explorer, etc... have supported this kind of functionality for ever... it's MIME embedding. I don't recall the exact syntax and it doesn't interest me enough to bother looking it up, but things like or (syntax is completely wrong, but the concept is there) have been around forever.
So, what's new about this? And more importantly, is someone just wasting my time by publishing a story about a program that just automates the process?
And in response to the earlier story from someone, last I checked SVG is a scalable format in web pages that theoretically is nearly identical to PDF. PDF is a path based renderer. By path based renderer, I mean that everything is based on (CreatePath, MoveTo, LineTo, ArcTo, ClosePath, FillPath) type operations. This is the mechanism that is adopted from PostScript (maybe some earlier technologies), SVG is based on the same idea.
pdf's are editable. not just through adobe's software, but 3rd party apps like pitstop. and personally, i have edited dozens of pdf forms. by the way, nearly all documents are printable. pdf's are great because they print the same no matter what app created it or what app you are viewing it in. (for the most part anyway) i agree that unipage is not a pdf replacement, though. i hope the text editors out there allow for a "save as unicode" option, as that may allow for a little more competition against word.
This begs the question - if the purpose is to excape a spawn of satan software like Adobe's PDF & its viewer, why create a format that can imbed web plugins, especially ones like flash?
If Unipage did replace PDF, we could expect a much worse time of things, when every Joe Average and business marketinghead in sundry attempts to embed Flash, Shockwave and Java into documents.
Now, I know this is Slashdot, but even here I'd expect a better effort than this FUD. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but anyway, you can both read and create PDFs using free (speech and beer) software, the very existence of which is possible because Adobe has kindly released the specs for PDF that are available to all without charge. Nor does Adobe charge for their own reader, although they do keep the source to themselves.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
PDF is an open standard as is, and certainly a good one, for a start. For saving documents (paper) in a way you can be guaranteed will render the same anywhere else. RTFA, and Unipage is entirely different and in no way competing project, revelant to saving webpages as "one-file", in an .mhtml way. Is that a common problem anyway?
But yes, even if misinformed, they aren't yet ready to take on Adobe Acrobat. from http://unipage.org/links.html
Links
Free software for creating dynamic web pages:
coming soon
Agreed. Upstarts like this NEED mac and linux versions more than most products do, because I feel like Mac and Linux users tend to be more willing to try products like this out.
Or perhaps it was made a slashdot story because many slashdot readers like to hear about new programs and projects allowing innovative new approaches to computing problems (in this case rich document transfer).
KDE Konqueror --> Web Archiver
.war extentsion (actually tar files)
Saves webpages with
I use this frequently to save pages before they vanish into nothingness,
I also email them to friends and family and they can view them on their machines
exactly as they originally appeared even if the original pages and or domain vaporize.
This has been in KDE for sometime now..
Idiot. Ghostscript
Try getting a magazine to print a spread or ad from this.
Sorry folks, print media requires PDF-x1 standards and that won't be going away.
It was too long a fight to get away from INDesign/Quark specs and PDF is actually a nice format.
With that said, why the hell would I want to look at 2 software versions of an ad to approve it when I can see the exact PDF the printer will use?
The other thing I saw as a narrow viewpoint was this quote
Isn't Windows the only OS that requires the 'special' software to view PDF's?
Most major picks of Linux has 3 PDF viewers and Mac has Preview out of the box.
The only thing that Mac Preview (as of Panther) doesn't do is PDF watermarking (acrobat feature only - Like permissions in corporate Office 2003).
I think all Unipage was trying to do was get away from the PDF plugin annoyance.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
PDF belongs to adobe and to develop using it you have to pay them for their patents use. So if you want to distribute yourself some PDF that's OK but if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money. And that's just leading to more and more lockin.
Utter rubbish. A number of different libraries capable of generating and working with PDF documents are available; for a free (as in beer and speech) Java one, look no further than Apache's own FOP.
Adobe's desktop applications (eg Distiller) are pay-for, yes, but there are no patents or other licensing issues; the PDF spec is freely available if you want to write your own implementation.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It can not even compare. the #1 use for PDF's here is the ability for management to sign the documents and send them upwards. We can do thousands of things with PDF that this looks like it cant not be done. There is no PHP module to create these as well as a myriad of other issues making it extremely far away from even approaching the useability of PDF.
Embedding Flash and JS is a negative as far as I am concerned. Last thing I need is a damned JS app buried in the document to try and contact a server to let the creator I opened the document.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Does the PDF standard belong to Adobe? - Yes, but they publish the standard in enough detail so that anyone can use it to read/write standard PDFs. See http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/ind ex_reference.html
e s-pdf.txt
Do they charge for this, their patents pertaining to PDF, etc? - No, not as long as you're trying to be compliant with the PDF standard. See http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/adobe-ipr-draft-zill
Adobe could have created a proprietary format and tried to defend it via patents, but they haven't. They could have also tried to make money off of 3rd parties trying to create PDF reader/writers by charging for patent licenses, but they haven't.
This is the reason that the PDF format (and, by association, Adobe) is the leader in this area.
don't forget the openoffice PDF export and the PDF Creator virtual printer.
pdf creator is great when dealing with coputers loaded with different software than the location you need to print at.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
PDF is free as in speech and beer. The specs are published and free and nobody has to pay Adobe to use it.
Fonts aren't free (few are freely given).
You might want to ask these companies how much they pay Adobe to create PDF tools ($0).
http://pdflib.com/
http://activepdf.com/
http://www.fastio.com/
http://www.openoffice.org/
If Adobe folds up tomorrow, PDF will survive.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
"PDF belongs to adobe and to develop using it you have to pay them for their patents use. So if you want to distribute yourself some PDF that's OK but if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money."
Just in case the previous posters haven't sufficiently beaten you with your own club, I'll also point out pdfTeX, which is distributed as part of the major free TeX distributions.
You're so wrong on this that I printed your comment as a PDF in OS X just to spite you.
"Sufferin' succotash."
HTML is for displaying content regardless of how it appears, in whatever the best format is for a program that is browsing the web.
PDF is for making a file that creates a copy of a printed page. Very useful for some things, completely inappropriate for others.
Yup, Ghostscript is very handy. On Windows, CutePDF and PDF Creator both wrap the Ghostscript engine in a friendly-to-non-techies UI.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
I agree with you. It seems like everything people are saying is how it doesn't stack up to all the slick shiney features of PDF. The problem I see is that people are using PDF's far too much for things that don't need to be PDF. I can't count how many times I go to a college athletic website to look at season stats or roster information and almost everything on the site is in PDF. For the same size of page in html the stupid page would be smaller/load faster. I want to puke when I see the acrobat reader splash screen come on when I want to look at a file that would amount to less than a printed page. PDF's may be great for some applications, but most applications I see them used for would be better suited as standard web pages.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Has everyone forgotten that the purpose of html is that the pages look different on different devices? The idea being that the information is what's important and the device should know how to best present it (given sufficient metadata). This is the exact opposite of the purpose of pdf, which looks the same no matter what. Of course some data could benefit from having part shown always the same and other parts shown according to device, and that's what this may do.
Wow, does that mean that it will hang my browser less than Acrobat does? Or crash less? Not just on one system, but on my home boxes, work systems, etc.
Why is that everyone wants the "do-it-all" product?
Its not that. The problem is that neither format is right for what people want out of a document format: editability and universal layout. HTML is easy to edit, but looks different depending on what you use to view it.
PDF, on the other hand, looks the same but isn't easy to edit.
Of course, this solution provides nothing new. You can encode images, flash files, etc. directly into the page as javascript variables that can be read by Mozilla-based browsers. Microsoft has a compressed html format that can handle almost anything, though not as much as the Mozilla browsers. I'd be very interested in seeing if they've found a way around Microsoft's limitation.
Anyway, if you're willing to limit everyone to using only one application for viewing (which is what you're doing if you're making everyone use this program to view) then its rather trivial to make this happen. I personally wrote something that did that for fun; it took me 15 hours because I also added public key encryption.
You can just tell everyone to use Firefox or just IE, depending on your preference.
This solution still doesn't add the pieces that are missing from HTML to make it work with printing. There is no way to specify headers, footers, widow or orphan rules, forced pagebreaks, or odd/even margins (well...outside of doing horribly intrusive things to the browser). I could care less if everything is one file or not. I use PDF writers because I can get this stuff in a ubiquitous format.
So where will we get an easily editable document format that we can use for printing? My money is on the OASIS open document format. Either that, or somebody finally implementing those things as part of CSS.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I think all Unipage was trying to do was get away from the PDF plugin annoyance.
Just for the record, in 2006 here are things that web developers should NOT do anymore.
Open up links in new windows, unless its for a reason. The only reason I can think of is when sites like CNN open up external links to indicate that you are leaving their domain, and they are not responsible for the external site's content or whatnot. (Its still annoying, but it has a valid reason).
NEVER, EVER, use plugins. EVER!
All content like PDFs and Java JAR files, should have a mime type to just download the file for offline viewing. The same with flash, or the new plugin of the week.
Am I the only person who uses the web and downloads files? Am I the only person on the web who knows how to open up a link in a new window or tab? I find some websites just to be annoying to navigate. I can't figure out their rhyme or reason for opening up in a new window or not (sometimes it appears random), and I can't figure out to close the window to go back to the previous page or to hit the back button. Less is more.
Really? I'd be interested in how you can do this in HTML. Note that although the link is a JPG, in the PDF format, it's all vector, no raster. When you zoom in the PDF document, the fonts remain crisp and sharp
I'm looking for a Windows driver that will capture my GDI calls and render to HTML. Any suggestions?
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
I think the poster was thinking more along these lines.
The problem is that neither format is right for what people want out of a document format: editability and universal layout. HTML is easy to edit, but looks different depending on what you use to view it. PDF, on the other hand, looks the same but isn't easy to edit.
.DOC.
PDF isn't supposed to be easily editable, and that's the point. If you're going to easy editability, a Microsoft Office format is pretty much the standard. If you're saving something in a PDF, it's to make sure the person you are sending it to sees precisely what you saw. It can't be changed easily, and it won't be rendered differently if it's opened in a different program.
Yeah, a do-all format should be easily edited and universally standard. But sometimes the do-all product isn't the best. If I send a file in PDF, it's in PDF for a reason. If I just wanted to make sure it was readable, I'd send it as
Computers need to explode more often.
PDF is built into OS X... Preview is just a handy little program to display them. That means that EVERY app on OS X can easily open, view and create PDF documents. There are PDF libraries for Linux too. Windows is just caught in the stone age.
Let's not forget that PDF is a Federal Information Processing Standard (aka FIPS). Adobe is required to provide free PDF readers and to provide open format specifications as a condition of remaining part of FIPS.
MHTML Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=212&application=firefox
This raises a question I've been asking for a while: Do we need an alternative to PDF? Or do we need an alternative to Acrobat? I would love to see an open source alternative to Acrobat Pro; Foxit Reader is great as freeware goes (once you get rid of the advertisement), but it can't do everything Acrobat Pro can, such as rearranging/deleting/adding pages. Plus it's definitely not as good at copying text. The same applies to GPL PDF-readers on Linux, such as xpdf.
Unfortunately, it seems there aren't any open source developers interested in making an alternative to Acrobat Pro. All too many are apparently more interested in making alternatives to open source software that already exists and does a fine job, such as new media players and text editors.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
I remember doing an infokiosk project - alone - in a VERY short ammount of time (from zero to stand-alone touch screen app in 5 days). One of the functions was to have the kiosk print a half page on a standard HP printer. The page had a complex graphic layout designed as an EPS, needed to insert a picture taken by the webcam and print it along with other info. My solution was to have the infokiosk app (a flash player stand-alone, talking to an apache/mysql/php backend - I said this was done FAST) generate a PDF using some not-too-well-known pure PHP PDF library and print it out via a adobe reader command line command. Was it elegant? No. Was it the best solution I could come up with in the one evening I had to get printing done and working? Yep.
Without PDF's openness, there is no way I could've done it, especially in that time-frame.
I agree -- an open source Acrobat replacement would be great.
I can't come up with any sort of burning hatred of PDF, as some people seem able to. Sure, back in the day, when I had a computer with 32 or 64MB of RAM, opening one by accident really sucked. Up until I figured out that there were better things than Adobe Acrobat Reader, it was still really annoying. But after Apple built PDF creation and reading into Mac OS, a lot of my dislike faded. I didn't hate the format, I just hated the reader.
So similarly, I wonder if there were better creation/editing/management tools other than Adobe's, if people would have less objections to it, and might not keep going down the blind alley of finding PDF alternatives?
After all, there is a PDF alternative, it's called DVI. In fact I think it predates PDF. But it's installed base is pretty close to zero (it's mostly only used by people who have LaTeX on Linux installed, and who for some reason aren't outputting directly to PDF). So it's not as though there aren't any alternatives. It's just that those alternatives don't really offer any compelling reasons to switch from PDF.
This Unipage business seems as though it's just a standardized web archive format, which makes me immediately wonder why they didn't just use one of the existing archive formats. (e.g., the Mac OS / Safari archive, or the Konqueror ".war" file.) Just on first glance it seems as though it's a reinvention of the wheel, although this time with the "ability" to encapsulate Flash, which is a malfeature in my opinion.
Anyway, PDF is here and it's here to stay -- it's been built into a lot of standalone devices (document scanners, fax systems) and I can't imagine that the format is really much of a moving target anymore, at least in its more basic implementations. But you're absolutely right: there is for some reason an odd shortage of FOSS manipulation tools for dealing with PDFs, at least that I've used so far.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
PDF is usually used as an electronic equivalent of giving someone a paper document. Just like a printout, it's not easily editable. That doesn't mean it can't be marked up or commented, stamped or signed, but you can't easily change what's written on the page.
That's a feature, not a limitation. There are enough 'editing' formats out there -- when somebody sends something out as PDF, it's usually because they are at the stage in paper-document process where they'd normally be printing it out and handing it around, either with a red pencil to mark up or with a pen to sign (or just for reading).
MS Word "doc" and hopefully in the future, OpenOffice files will provide the editing formats. But there will still be a demand for an 'electronic paper' format where you can only write on the document, not change it substantially, and where it looks the same to everyone.
Unfortunately, while there are alternatives to Adobe's software for viewing and creating now, the markup and signing/verification market is still basically dominated by them. I'd love to see some free tools for doing stuff like commenting, reviewing, and signing. I think the FOSS community would do better to concentrate on this, than put a lot of effort into developing new distribution formats that will probably never catch on.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The reason you see PDF so often is it's a really easy transition from paper, which everyone is familiar with the tools to produce printed documents. If you don't use PDF, maintaining a website with information changing on a daily basis like that takes either a lot of maintenance by someone who knows HTML or some GUI tool, or a more sophisticated database driven application that's custom build for that sort of thing.
AccountKiller
Or you can use HTML and embed everything using data: URLs - RFC 2397
Corollary: Use basic HTML for navigation menus.
That means, no flash and if you want to use javascript then make sure that it works without it. I, for one, middle click on any links that I want to visit, then close the current tab and look at each in turn. It's a lot more convienant than hitting "Back" every page. But with flash this doesn't work (and I care far less about the links sliding in from the side when I load the page than I do about actually using them). Also, if you solely rely on a plugin for navigation, what happens when people don't have that plugin? I use BeOS as my primary OS and guess which popular browser plugins are not availible for it? (BTW, a lot of people also disable those plugins or don't have them installed.)
With javascript use something like: href="blah.html" target="_blank" onclick="window.open(); return: false;". Don't use: href="#" onclick=... or href="javascript:window.open(). (My HTML/JS might be a bit rusty, but you get the idea.) Nothing is more annoying (or confusing the first time it happens) then middle clicking five links and opening the same page or blank pages five times.
Someone posted this months ago, and it tells how to gut-out a lot of the add-ins that make acrobat so slow to open. You lose some functionality, but much of it is un-needed while viewing pdfs on the web.
How to use liposuction to repair Adobe Reader 6
I couldn't believe the difference it made.
This is the multimedia, arty, entertainment side of the internet, not the informative - where Flash indeed can be a pain. Now if the Internet is a democracy there should at least be room for modern art.
I can't count how many times I go to a college athletic website to look at season stats or roster information and almost everything on the site is in PDF. For the same size of page in html the stupid page would be smaller/load faster.
They didn't want to make two different versions, one in PDF and one in HTML. Of the two, they chose PDF because it's printer-friendly. If you're frustrated by the long time it takes AR to load, then why are you still using AR as your PDF plugin? I use xpdf as my browser plugin, and there's virtually no delay at all.
Find free books.
PDF is an open standard. Anyone can create PDFs or programs that create/modify them without paying any royalties to Adobe. Adobe's viewer is not required to view or create PDFs.
Just because the company that created it makes bloated reader software does not make the format itself the "spawn of satan". PDFs are quite usable, thank you.
PDF is locked in for years in the Print/Design industry. It is now the industry standard to send files, many printers (including us) surcharge for files that are not PDF. All modern RIP's are PDF, practically every print workflow systems are ALL PDF based. Different doesn't mean better either. You can hardly say something is an alternative to a widley used product by reading an article.
If you're not going to use a technical term correctly, don't use it at all. The public is already confused enough about science(*), is it too much to ask that we use a little rigor? It's important that the public knows what it means when we say that "Intelligent design is a fundamentally question-begging response to the problem of speciation", or that when George Bush justifys the war in Iraq by saying he'd do anything to protect america, he's begging the question "Is the war in Iraq protecting america?"
These are not little things, these are phrases that could come up in any sunday morning news show and people need to know what they mean.
*(counting logic as part of science here)
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
i dio t?
god in IT? Whoah. Hey there, I appreciate the compliment and all, but I'm a financial investor these days. Thanks for the warm fuzzies though!I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Microsoft Office format is pretty much the standard.
.DOC.
No, it's not. Any given MS document only renders correctly with the Microsoft Office edition in which it was made, and in no other renderer does it render perfectly. Further, this rendering is not guaranteed to be the same because there is no specification. Also, you can't embed fonts in it.
To top it off, even RTF, which Microsoft renders a spec for, isn't correctly rendered by any version of Word. So essentially there is no standard for any Microsoft document format.
To go further, though, office documents are not easily editable! In fact, they're almost more difficult to edit than PDFs are! Its a closed-source, binary file format with lots of quirks. You're not going to be editing it with a 50KB WYSIWYG editor like you can with HTML.
The point isn't that they're not easy to edit. The point is that they always look the same no matter how use 'em. Otherwise, Adobe wouldn't have released Acrobat (which can not only write, but also edit PDFs), would they? The only reason that they're not easy to edit is because the document format is a functional subset of PS, and that is more of a drawing format with built-in text writing than it is a document format. Its a technical limitation, not a designed feature. Acrobat would be a real cash-cow if Adobe could suddenly create a decent document writer for it that competes with Word.
Yeah, a do-all format should be easily edited and universally standard. But sometimes the do-all product isn't the best. If I send a file in PDF, it's in PDF for a reason. If I just wanted to make sure it was readable, I'd send it as
I take it you're not a programmer. Or if you are, then you're a Microsoft junkie. There are PDF libraries for virtually every programming language for free or cheap. There are almost no DOC generating libraries. Even if there were, doc is not a standard as I have said.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
No, it's not a valid reason. It's wrong. Every browser's *address bar* is good enough at indicating that you are leaving some domain, and this does it create a usability nightmare for visitors to the site.
I know what you're saying, but I think this kind of behaviour attempts to solve a problem that just isn't there, and creates a mess in the process.
http://outcampaign.org/
ZIP FILES are a way to store a complete web page as just one file!
http://outcampaign.org/
SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics
Vectors graphics turned into a small XML file, coming soon to a browser near you, unless you use Firefox 1.5 in which case, you've got it already.
Just needs a little more time to mature and stabalize and it will be very commonplace.