That solution does absolutely nothing to help people who can’t, or don’t want to, read PDFs. Get it?
PDF warnings are a common courtesy all over the web. It’s not specific to this place, though users of this board are probably more likely to link to pdfs than users of most other boards. All you have to do is type “(pdf)” after the link; it’s not like it’s a lot of extra work.
If I’m aware that a link is a PDF ahead of clicking on it, I’ll always choose to right click and save it for viewing in the reader application; an ordinary left-click on it (for many people, dependent on installation etc) opens it in the browser, which just plain sucks most of the time.
I’m sorry, but it does.
I would like to recommend an extension for Firefox users.
http://www.rabotat.org/firefox/
With this extension, every time you click on a PDF link, a dialog box comes up telling you the size of the PDF (useful for dial-up users) and giving you a few options: opening it in a new tab, saving it to disk, or converting it to HTML in a new tab.
Of course, this does not negate the usefulness of warnings: not everybody uses Firefox, and not all Firefox users want to install this extension.