[thelist] RE: Adobe bashing

[ANDREA STREIGHT]

Honestly, I don't exactly know why when that little monster Adobe Acrobat 
starts running, and I click on "Decline", but it won't respond to "Decline", 
and keeps trying to run on my system, I don't know why that happens.

Is it the fault of my IE browser? Maybe. I don't know.

Am I the only one who has experienced this PDF system hijacking?

If a file is PDF, please label it as such, prior to user clicking on it. I 
have seen Flash Paper offered as an alternative to PDF, see Usability 
Special Interest Group newsletter for example:

www.stcsig.org/usability/index.html

Adobe Acrobat "useless"? To me it is. Many files that don't seem to be all 
that big are formated as PDF. I don't know why. It reminds me of the 
insistence on HTML email newsletters.

Maybe a better word than "useless" would be "annoying" or "dysfunctional" or 
"unresponsive to Decline command" or "system hijacking".

The useit.com Jakob Nielsen article I had in mind in particular was "PDF: 
Unfit for Human Consumption".

Like I said, there may be good purposes for PDF, and it may have some good 
qualities for printing massive text files. I don't deal with massive text 
files, so I have no experience with this issue, or what a good alternatives 
to PDF.

All I know is that PDF is the only file that hijacks my system, I guess you 
might call this "browser crashing" except I have to go to great lengths to 
evacuate a persistent and unwanted PDF file download.

In other words:

Unwanted, persistent PDF files act almost like a virus.


Steven Streight
Web Usability Analyst/Web Artist
astreight at msn.com
vaspersthegrate at yahoo.com
www.vaspersthegrate.blogspot.com
www.streightsite.blogspot.com
www.arttestexplosion.blogspot.com