Data formats are important. Choosing how to structure data is the first thing one might do with it. Deciding how to present information is equally important. Web sites need to stop using PDF and Word documents as the ONLY option for available information. It’s OK to use these formats as options for download, but the same data should be available as a web page in any instance. There is a ton of software out there now that can parse XML data, not to mention many other formats of data, and automagically create documents such as web pages or pdfs from the same source data.
I am personally disgusted and turned off by schools and government agencies that provide the most current information in a downloadable PDF or Word format only! All this means is that their technology implementation and employee skills are crap. It is absolutely heinous and inexusable when it is a university computer science or engineering school that does this. I will name names here. A few guilty parties: the University of Texas Computer Science school, A&M University’s computer science school. 2 schools well known for their technical prowess and financial largess, both are criminal in their failures to implement appropriate technology solutions while teaching such topics at the same time. They are not alone. Schools all over the world and at all levels of resources and achievements have failed in this regard.
When you create or use a content management system, use programmers to make sure it is sufficient to do what you need it to do and train workers to produce and store data in ways conducive to using it.
Nobody want’s to print your school course catalogue at home. Nor do they really want to browse that PDF in a web browser plugin that loads very slowly and will probably crash the browser. No. Use stinking XML for what it was designed for. Use style sheets too. Offer a link to an interpreted language script that will generate a PDF if it is wanted, or generate one and have it available for download if you really think the pretty printing is important, but don’t waste energy making information only available as PDF documents.
It’s stupid.
2 comments ↓
[...] Goodbye Helicopter pretty much wrote the way I feel about the lack of insight (or interest) given by many organizations to data formats and the idea of data exchange. I think a lot about data exchange, sorry thats just me. Not sure what my favourite part of the article was thought. It could have been… “…personally disgusted and turned off by schools and government agencies that provide the most current information in a downloadable PDF or Word format only! All this means is that their technology implementation and employee skills are crap.” [...]
[...] Goodbye Helicopter pretty much wrote the way I feel about the lack of insight (or interest) given by many organizations to data formats and the idea of data exchange. I think a lot about data exchange, sorry thats just me. Not sure what my favourite part of the article was thought. It could have been… “…personally disgusted and turned off by schools and government agencies that provide the most current information in a downloadable PDF or Word format only! All this means is that their technology implementation and employee skills are crap.” [...]
Leave a Comment