Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark
I don't even know where to start here. So much is offensive.
As mentioned before, the web was never text only. Precursors to the internet were, but the "world wide web" always had images. The internet also postdates when "most computer monitors were 8" or less and monochomatic". The internet was created in 1989, not 1969.
Back then, it wasn't that such and such was cool, or what ever, it was "hey, look what I made my computer do". We created then. People had intelligence. Here you are, talking about people that were on the absolute bleeding edge of things, but acting as if they are luddites.
As far as getting some action, I lived and was part of computers then, and still am, but I'm probably getting laid more often than you are.
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I'm not too enthusiastic about these computer/internet analogies, as I don't think the ebook world has yet evolved to the "lime green on blaze orange" sensibility that gave me nightmares in the Geocities/Tripod era.
I guess the development of CSS may have some parallels, as I was doing design on occasion when CSS started displacing complex invisible table formats. Implementation was often poor, interoperability was pretty bad, and a lot of users from the old school of web design dismissed stylesheets altogether.
I
still know some web designers who dislike CSS but think of it and xml and php and everything as necessary evils. I eventually hopped on the CSS train and though it's still not platform independent, it's a lot closer since IE6 is being phased out.
Rigid format options are one of the attractions to a book for me. It's not for others, and that's fine. Some of us were there complaining about the shift to printed type which naturally cannot offer the expressiveness of a well-trained calligraphic hand with a brush or the sense of quality and confidence derived from well-chiseled stone could not be replicated on silk or paper.
I think there will always be die-hard adherents to older format conventions, and I'm likely to be included in that group. Even so, I don't mind some evolution of the written word. Just as ligatures and kerning are a development in moveable type, there will be room for designers, typographers, etc. to develop the digital bookface. New solutions must be made to accommodate for the problems that arise in the nature of the format. Some of the PDF adherents here are simply that way because a large portion of the design world has intentionally turned its back on ebooks and ebook readers thus far, and the current formatting solutions are incredibly unrefined and underdeveloped. As the display technologies become less inferior and the medium becomes more feasible, I've no doubt that the formats will be scrutinized more closely and evolution will commence.
Most of us who are typographic snobs don't mind a bit of work in resetting books ourselves. There are some things that could be done to make the task slightly more efficient, but in general I don't have a big problem converting my LIT or RTF files to a much higher quality rigid PDF.