Re: Oracle 8 *Top 10 wishlist*

Aram Meguerian wrote:
>
> >
>
> In fact, I cannot really say why PDFs are better than HTMLs,
> except that I feel them to be easier to read, organize and keep
> track while reading a bunch of manuals at the same time. Besides,
> the acrobat reader are so much more cute than any html browser ...
> Not a valid reason to anibody else, but reason enough to me.
>
> --
>

True, but at least with HTML it's always backwards compatible to some degree. Acrobat is much more brittle. For example, a client sent me some pdf's to look at a few days back - unfortunatly they were from Acrobat version 3, which was released last November. I only had version 2.1 on my machine, and all the cdroms I had to hand (including several pressed within the last month or so) only had version 2.1 on them. So my only option to read the files was to go and download version 3 from the web. At this point one finds out that a) the acrobat file size has now more than doubled to 3.9Mb, which is *large* for a 28K modem transfer, b) the site is horribly _slow_ c) there's only two mirrors, both of which are _even_slower_ and d) all three sites are on the wrong side of the pond (i.e. usa) for me so I only stand a change of getting the software in the morning on expensive telephone rate.

Adobe are never going to get acceptance this way. They need to create _small_ modular downloads (the 3 download is so large is because it's full of bloat add-ons) on a network of mirror sites.

Kevin

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