Newspapers as Web-hostile islands
“As of today, one of my country’s (Brazil’s) largest newspapers is totally dumping HTML in favor of PDF editions. According to their website, the HTML format ‘didn´t include important parts of the newspapers, such as graphics, images, stock quotes and classifieds.’” - A post to the Online-News list.
The TeleRead take: The message didn’t give the name of the paper. I certainly agree with the poster’s observation that “to completely dump HTML in favor of PDF is a little bit of overkill.” Actually a lot of it. Do newspapers really want to entrust their destiny to Adobe? No telling where the format is headed. Remember, it’s proprietary. Oh, and there are little issues such as easy, seamless linking. Is the wet dream of newspaperdom to destroy the Web? Regressive strategies like the Brazilian newspaper’s bring out the paranoid in most all of us who love the Net. Let’s hope such worries are unwarranted.
Further thoughts: Jon Noring writes: “Another option the Brazilian newspaper should have considered is to stick with HTML/XHTML for their online newspaper, and use SVG for the more complex layout requirements.
“SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics) is an open standards, XML-based, W3C specification which replaces much of the rendering capabilities provided by PDF and Macromedia Flash. There now exist quite good browser plug-ins for displaying SVG markup–Adobe has one of the better ones. So, with SVG, one can have their cake, and eat it to. For an online newspaper, SVG makes a whole lot of sense, as it does for more complex ebooks.”
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