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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