Acrobat-bashing? was Re: [thelist] RE: switch from IE to Firefox?

M. Seyon evoltlist at delime.com
Tue Nov 16 17:34:41 CST 2004


Message from ANDREA STREIGHT (11/16/2004 01:07 PM)

>Not to start a new thread, but someone asked what I disliked about Adobe
>Acrobat. See Jakob Nielsen's useit.com alert boxes on this issue.
>
>I hate PDF files that are not labelled as such, so when I click on a file, I
>get the Adobe message to accept or decline, then I decline, and my computer
>freezes up, and the damned program keeps trying to run on my computer, so I
>have to shut it down just to stop the freaking thing.

How exactly is this a failing on the part of Acrobat though?

You may as well say you hate Photoshop because sometimes people put those 
up on websites too. Or the MP3 file format. Or zips, tars, rars and any 
other filetype that a browser doesn't natively handle.

Also, which alertbox articles? The one summarised as "Users get lost inside 
PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized 
for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for 
printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation."?

Jakob Nielsen doesn't call Acrobat "useless". Quite the opposite - in the 
very first line he says "PDF is great for one thing and one thing only: 
printing documents".

Courtesy the Oxford English Dictionary, "useless - serving no useful 
purpose". Or if you prefer, Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (via 
dictionary.com), "useless - having, or being of, no use; unserviceable; 
producing no good end; answering no valuable purpose; not advancing the end 
proposed; unprofitable; ineffectual."

Even Nielsen thinks it's great for *something*, it serves *some* useful 
purpose, if only one. So I'm not understanding your comment about Acrobat 
being a useless item.

There's an interesting rebuttal on the topic here - 
http://www.planetpdf.com/enterprise/article.asp?ContentID=6285

The most amusing sentence was "He [Jakob Nielsen] conveniently failed to 
mention that his own research group makes its for-profit reports available 
for purchase online in PDF."

Like everything else, the right technology for the job.

I think many people turn away from Nielsen's writing not because he's flat 
out wrong, but because he's so narrow-minded and self-righteous in his 
approach. As a writer it's easy to let your emotions and personal opinions 
flow into your writing, but if you can't properly defend your chosen dogma 
I think people soon lose respect for you. FWIW I find a lot more 
enlightenment and fulfilment in the writings of Nielsen's partner - Don Norman.


>Large amounts of text to put online? Need to use PDF files? Maybe. But I
>don't like em.

See. That's personal opinion. You may as well say "that girl Sally is 
useless" because she dumped you. Doesn't mean she's not quite useful to 
someone else.

Discussion for extra credit, is Flash still 99% bad now that Dr. Nielsen is 
a consultant to Macromedia? 
(http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2002/macromedia_nielsen.html)

regards.
-marc

--
Trinidad Carnival in all its photographic glory. Playyuhself.com
http://www.playyuhself.com/


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