A few years ago, it used to be considered good form on here to prominently mark any links to PDF files as such, to accommodate people whose computers were so slow and crappy and/or misconfigured as to grind to a halt when trying to render them (or something), but yet were too lazy to actually check the links they were clicking themselves.
In case it is not obvious, this always annoyed me. Is this still considered good practice, or have people gotten over their aversion to essentially the only standard, open format for electronic documents?
Yes, it’s still considered the polite and thoughtful thing to do, like giving a heads up if you are linking to a page that plays sound or has pop-ups. It’s never been required as a board rule or anything.
Over the last couple of years, PDF files have caused browser hangups and crashes more often that all other causes combined, on both my Macs and Windows machines. On older Windows machines, I won’t open PDF files at all. The Adobe PDF plugin is probably the buggiest commercial browser plugin I’ve ever encountered.
And, believe it or not, there are still people out there without broadband connections. They simply don’t want to wait 10 seconds for the plugin to load and another 10 for the file to download, just to discover the file isn’t that interesting in the first place.
Someone else can’t spare even less time than that to actually READ the url? You have someone imposing something on me they can easily handle themselves. How does that mutate into “courteous”?
The easiest solution is let the board software format the url itself. Then the pdf extension is clearly visible.
What the “Wombat” said! “The Adobe PDF plugin is probably the buggiest commercial browser plugin I’ve ever encountered.” If you put in a “PDF Warning”, I know to “download” it, rather than clicking on it and enduring the abysmally bad rendering the plug-in does. They are readable, and useful, using the standard reader. They are unendurable if rendered in the browser plug-in Adobe provides. If you put in the warning, I always “save-to-disk”. If you don’t, I suddenly see it’s loading a PDF, and I cancel. I frequently then decide that I don’t want to waste my time on it. The choice is yours. Warn me and there’s a good chance I will read it, or don’t, and there’s a good chance I will never take the trouble to bother.
You misunderstand. You don’t have to label your pdf links as being pdf’s. There’s no coercion involved at all. We’ll just think you’re impolite if you don’t label such links. It’s entirely your call.
Primarily, it bothers me because I think PDF is a far superior format to the mess that HTML, CSS and Javascript have turned into. Many web pages now are so bloated with banner ads, ill-designed comment systems, Javascript shit, integrated social media crap from 15 other sites, and god knows what else that they slow my brand-new computer to a crawl, while PDFs pretty much load instantly. PDFs are also easier to create than HTML pages. They render the same on any computer you view them on, and they even look the same when you print them out.
These days, I would much rather receive a link to the PDF version of an article than the HTML version. It bothers me that PDF gets a bum rap around here.
Well, that sounds like a problem with your machine. Even on my 5-year-old Apple PowerBook, PDFs open pretty much instantly - no Adobe plug-in required, PDF support is part of OS X. I have never had problems with Acrobat Reader on a Windows machine, but if you really dislike it, there are a number of free, open-source alternatives that are supposed to be better.
PDFs are not guaranteed to be large files, any more than HTML pages are guaranteed to be large. What matters is the content and how the file was created.
Here, for example, is an exemplary PDF document. It is eight pages long, and contains a number of figures, illustrations, and tables.
For comparison, the CNN homepage is approximately 1300 KB, and so full of bloated, crappy HTML and Javascript that it takes a good 6 seconds to render completely on my computer even once it has fully downloaded. You don’t see people complaining about accidentally clicking on CNN links. Sites like the Huffington Post are even worse. By comparison, a 1300 KB PDF loads and renders nearly instantaneously, as soon as the first page is downloaded.
Of course I can. But it’s really a matter of principle. PDF is a standard format, just like HTML, PNG, JPEG, etc. It is widely used all over the web. And the SDMB seems to be the only place where people can’t seem to figure out how to handle it. If your computer isn’t set up to handle PDFs without causing you grief, that’s your problem, not mine.
“Politeness” and “courtesy” on the internet should not be extended to trying to accommodate every screwed up system configuration out there.
It should be noted that not all links to PDF files end in .pdf . Often, they’ll be found in databases of some sort, and the URL will end with &article=79423 or something.
My copy of firefox is configured to save .pdfs automatically. My copy of IE is not. I just tried Absolute’s link in IE and I got a warning message: “A website wants to open web content using this program on your computer. …if you do not trust this website do not open this program.”
I think it’s good form to let people know what they’re clicking. Whether it be a .JPG, .PDF, .DOC, YouTube link or anything else that is not plain vanilla html. It’s very easy to type (PDF) after the link.
You misunderstand. You are absolutely correct that PDF can be and frequently is superior to the crappy web pages that so-called “professional web designers” are putting out, today. I prefer PDF links, too. The problem is that Adobe’s web browser plug-in is total crap. Piss-poor navigation within the document, eats processor cycles so badly that everything slows to a crawl, etc. Acrobat Reader, on the other hand, is a great piece of software. Works very well. THAT’s why we want a warning. I see the warning, I immediately “save to disk”, then open up with Acrobat Reader. I don’t see a warning, I just click the link, it takes a few seconds to notice that it’s a PDF opening up in my web browser, and their stupid plug-in has already started to slow stuff down, so it’s troublesome to stop it. After that, I frequently decide it’s not worth the trouble to download it and read it “off-line”.
It’s not the File format that’s the problem, and it’s not Acrobat Reader that’s the problem. It’s the crappy browser plug-in reader that’s the problem.
I can’t read the URL all of the time. On my iPad, for example, if you just have a link tag wrapped around a word in a sentence, I have no idea what it is.
I do understand the argument that PDF files look pretty close to the same on all systems, and that any idiot can click “print as PDF” to make one. It’s the same argument that’s made for Flash. It’s a way to break everything the Web is based around: separation of content and format, consistent navigation methods, and small fast-loading content.
The “average” PDF file is much larger than the “average” HTML file. When visiting a Web site, style sheets, page headers, navigation images, and other items that are consistent from page to page only have to load once, and then they can be pulled from the browser’s cache. Images only have to be at the screen’s resolution in HTML, where PDFs frequently have high-resolution images for print. This leads to PDF loading and rendering being consistently slower.
But all of that pales in comparison to the Adobe PDF being a bug-ridden piece of bloatware that crashes and hangs up browsers. It’s not a misconfigured computer. I have had the problem on dozens of computers over the last few years.
It’s a courtesy that requires less effort than creating the link in the first place. Other people have already addressed many of the points I would have, but this:
is simply not true. I’ve worked in publishing enough to know it is never safe to assume something will look the same on every computer or when printed. Sometimes there are minor, cosmetic differences, and sometimes they can render the file worthless.
This argument always reminds me of the argument that thieves cause doorlocks; so thieves are a good thing, because they remind you to lock your door.
Or even more apropos, the old argument that hackers that wrecked your system were great because they taught you to lock down your system better.
I ALWAYS mouse over links. Not all links tell you what they are. Fact is, if I can’t see what it is and haven’t been told, I just flat out won’t click on it.
But, as Squink and others have said, there’s no coercion. You don’t have to label your pdf links. It’s just polite…and I and many others won’t click on them if we can’t see what they are.
Not all documents are exemplary. Not all users are exemplary. Rules, guidelines, and expectations are therefore set for the worst case (or close to it) not the best case (or close to it).
Politeness is exemplary. Not everyone cares about politeness as seem by the truly amazing number of threads started asking, “do I really have to be polite, mommy?”
No, you don’t *have *to. You should. It’s far easier for you and for everyone than any other course of action.
Just speaking from my own personal opinion, deciding not to be polite simply as a matter of “principle” is not a particularly good principle to use to govern your interactions with other people.
I do, too. But more and more people are accessing the SDMB using touchscreen devices like iPads where you can’t mouseover the links. The warning is even more important then.
They don’t even always render the same in different PDF viewers, let alone different computers. I’ve found that documents will render slightly differently in Foxit than they do in Adobe. And if you try to open newer documents in older versions of Adobe…
“Well than update your viewer” you may say. Well, you were singing PDF’s praises over HTML, but fact of the matter is I generally don’t HAVE to update my browsers to see new pages, just for new features/extensions or security updates. Pages may render differently in FF than they do in IE or Opera or Chrome but they still render the same in Firefox 3.6 as they do in 1.5.
Treating someone as impolite IS the coercion. Saying otherwise is disingenuous.
It seems to me that the discussions I’ve seen here on this topic always start with someone affected simply declaring dogmatically “It’s impolite to do this”. They never ask “How do I get around this?” or even “Could everyone please do this for me and others in my situation?” They simply impose their easily self-remedied needs on me.
That’s the part that really is the issue with me.
Just speaking from my own personal opinion, deciding others have to do some task you can easily do yourself simply as a matter of politeness is not a particularly good principle to use to govern your interactions with other people.
I can’t tell you how much I sympathize that you have the latest computer and that it can’t do something as simple as that.