Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
 This whole set of pro-PDF responses seem to be neglecting a very fundamental fact. Paper based information is meant for comsumption by humans. Digital information is meant (primarily) for consumption by computers. Sure humans read ebooks, but computers read them a lot more.
Given that, a format that maximizes ease of use for computers is the format of the future. Advanced typography (which is a way to make things more readable for humans, at the expense of readability for computers) will fall by the roadside.
Readability for computers means representing content independently of markup in a semantic fashion. PDF is absolutely (and understandably) miserable at that. So bye-bye PDF and bye-bye advanced typography. |
If that is the premise you begin with, then you might as well say computers are made for computers so
bye-bye human beings. If computers were not made to ultimately to aid human beings but rather to aid in digital forms then I think we're entering cuckoo land.
Yes, there are intermediary stages where it is machine aiding machine but the ultimate aim of that is to aid human beings. So I'm thinking of the UPC barcode which is not easily readable by human beings without the numbers at the bottom of the barcode. The UPC barcode was made to be machine readable. But the ultimate end process of that is to ultimately aid human beings somewhere down the line.
Digital books is an end of the line product and so ultimately its aim is for human beings.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
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.
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I'm not sure how it is that PDF "gets in the way of that", meaning get in the way of computers being able to extract and recombine information. I think you're talking about a markup language? But you could actually tag PDFs down to the word I believe, but I do know that at least you can tag PDF down to the paragraph if not the word.
And what your argument makes me think of also is how prior to the days of GUI being popular, lots of people were saying GUI got in the way of computers handling information and even got in the way of human beings handling information. Ah well...the days of GUI is certainly not gone and were stronger than before ;-)
Ultimately I think those of us who expound the benefits of using PDF is ultimately making the argument that design (which includes typesetting, kerning, leading, layout, etc.)
matters. The argument there is not actually to say PDF is the end-all-be-all, but is to explain why the other formats thus far are inadequate. Sure, another format could replace PDF, but what we're really talking about here is the
importance of design that needs to be carried over in a new/forthcoming digital book format (one whose end consumption is ultimately for human beings and not for some machine).