Too often, the hottest technologies ride on nothing more than hot air. Don't confuse good looks, marketing hype, or even dominant market share with value. Many of the most familiar, popular, and widely used technologies cultivate cachet they just don't deserve. Here's bMighty's picks for nine overblown technologies that just don't deliver the goods for business.
There's nothing wrong with PDFs (portable document format). Really. They have many legitimate uses -- we use them here at bMighty.com! -- especially for documents meant to be printed. But that's it. If an online document is not specifically meant to printed, there's simply no reason for it to be in PDF.
If you're looking at content on the Web, it should take advantage of the Web's fluidity, navigation, and scalability, not cling to some obsolete paper metaphor.
Here's a short list of reasons why PDFs suck:
You get pestered to upgrade to the latest release of Acrobat Reader. What a waste of time. Can anyone actually tell the difference between one release and the next?
They take too long to load, much longer than standard HTML, even on a fast connection.
When they finally do load, they always seem to pop up in the wrong size. I want to see my documents at 100%, not 72% and not 172%.
Cutting and pasting is much more difficult than with an HTML page. Often there are weird fonts that don't translate well, or other nonstandard behavior.
They have page breaks. What's up with a page break in an online document?
Sometimes they're in 2-column format, which means you're scrolling up and back on the screen to read them.
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