Quote:
Originally Posted by PhishStyx
I'm sorry, but your opening premise is inaccurate. Regardless of being put into digital format, e-books and other human oriented content (ie webpages) is in fact intended for consumption by humans. Computers surely transmit and organize that content for display, but they do not in any significant sense "read" it. You are conflating different meanings of the term read.
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No computers read content all the time. That's what search engines do and the computer "reading" of information (in the sense of extracting meaning from it) is a rapidly and inevitably growing process. A part of this whole process is the ability of computers to extract and recombine information from disparate sources, much more easily than humans. And display oriented formats like PDF just get in the way of that.
Improvements in the typrography options offered by semantic formats will undoubtedly happen, but non-semantic formats like PDF are obsolete, a temporary waystation on the road from clay tablets to digital information.