Adobe Acrobat

[JQ Johnson]

>it is the
>informational content of the document that is important not the format.

As the years go by, I find this argument more and more parochial.
Perhaps it's simply a false dichotomy, but I suspect it reflects a deeper
misunderstanding of the meaning of "information".  As usually presented,
it sells well to people in text-based fields, but not at all well to
people who are focused on fields like visual design, and not even to
academics in fields whose particular informational content is poorly
captured by HTML.

Anyone who has tried to display the informational content of a complex
mathematical work in HTML knows that HTML in its present form is
ill-suited for the task.  Languages that do a good job of setting
mathematics (such as TeX) have primitives that describe information
content PRECISELY in terms of format (e.g. the degree to which 2 elements
are tightly glued together along the vertical dimension).

Anyone who appreciates the beauty of books knows the skill that goes
into typesetting a printed page.  Try setting your favorite ee cummings
poem using only the "informational" tags of HTML to see what I mean.

HTML certainly has a major place in the near future of the web.  But that
doesn't preclude use of other formats for delivery of types of information
content for which HTML is ill suited.  In particular, my own guess is
that PDF and similar languages, that much more precisely capture the
appearance of the printed page, are a good choice for a wide range
of web-based publishing where the format of the work is part of the
information content, particularly in environments where the same work
is published in both paper and web versions.