Acrobat

[David Blyth <dblyth -at- QUALCOMM -dot- COM>]

>><anonymous> writes:

>>   o The Web is dynamic (the "24 Hours in Cyberspace" Web site will be
>>         modified every half-hour).  Hard-copy documents are static.

I confess!  I'm anonymous!

>Unless the changes were exceedingly well documented and I could retrieve any
>earlier version as quickly as the latest revision, I would be very unhappy
>if I was asked to use a manual which changed between accesses.

Not a problem.  For example, Netscape's basic manuals and release
notes for each release of each product are all kept on-line (in Hypertext
HTML format accesible over the Web).  The difference is that Netscape
can and does add additional information on-the-fly - without deleting
previous information.

You generally don't lose functionality over the Web.  If you want to
be static, you can be.  If you want hard copy, then you can print out
the formatted HTML.  (I read in bed, so certainly understand the need
for paper!).

What you lose is formatting.  You can't know which browser is used
by the reader, so you can't control the fonts, pointsize, colors,
and spacing as easily (if at all).  Conversely, you gain the formatting
tools peculiar to the Web - photos, color, image maps, perl scripts and
so forth.

One of things I'm trying to get away from is that idea that hard
copy formatting is magic.  Can you express the same concepts with fewer
hard copy tools using a larger set of Internet tools?  IMHO, it's
the idea that counts - not the set of tools used to express it.

And IMHO, the Web has a much larger tool set overall - take a
look sometime with Netscape 2.0.




David (The Man) Blyth
Technical Writer
Qualcomm

The usual disclaimers apply - I don't speak for QUALCOMM, they don't speak
for me....