Dear Webmasters and Webmistresses, Online Businesses everywhere

[smarriveurr]

You know what's worse than making information you want on your website available only in .pdf form in this day and age?

Making it available only as a .pdf wrapped in a static-height-and-width iframe that ends up smaller than the fucking .pdf to be displayed..pdfs lead to plug-ins. Plug-ins lead to interior chrome. Interior chrome leads to ugly,

Comments

[firynze]

...ew. EW.

[smarriveurr]

Yes, exactly. The .pdf format is already a bit of a hotbutton for me - I can see applications for it still, but it's massively abused for situations where HTML would be not only sufficient, but superior. Using it where an embedded .png would be an infinite improvement? So bad I had to pick up a new icon.

[firynze]

It's useful for things like, I dunno, ebook downloads and manuals and the like. For actual information on your site? Use the damn html.

[smarriveurr]

Precisely. It's acceptable when taking text that was for print and quickly popping it up. It's useful for things you expect readers to print out. If you for some reason desperately need to lock down your visuals, or prevent cut-and-paste plagiarism, OK. But far, far too many things that are primarily for online consumption end up as multi-column .pdfs in portrait layouts, or just huge blocks of unformatted text that would have worked infinitely better with no page breaks and the ability to easily resize or alter on my part.

[stephiny]

I like when a company does the whole save the environment thing and states on their website that phone or email communication is preferable. You know, saving paper and all that. It really makes me happy to see them put their application form online as a .pdf (though the static-height-and-width iframe is annoying). But then I have to print out the fucking thing to fill it in as it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that they could just turn it into a form. It's not hard to do! .pdf's are ideal for that!

[smarriveurr]

My television company offers "ecobilling" - get your statements and pay the bill online. Except, whenever they're required by the government to send me information, apparently they're required to mail it. And it's included with a copy of the bill. And in the envelope with the information and the bill is a full page glossy advertisement for their ecobill system. And it seems they're required to send me something nearly every damn month, so they'd actually save more trees by not advertising their stupid fucking "ecobill" service. I guess it would be too hard to program something to look through and say "Oh, this customer already gets ecobills, let's not waste paper advertising to him, just send him a tiny slip with the info we're required to send."