Re: When Joss Met Matt Epub
Katja Gains
And I certainly prefer them to this horrible "modern web design" aesthetic with excessive whitespace and low contrast text. As long as they are mostly free of this disgusting style, I don't care how clunky PDFs are.
I don't know if I would say it's declined. It's always been bad. The flashing text and animated gifs of the GeoSpace days, flash everywhere through the 90's, now everything designed by UI "Experts" who havent got a clue what there spouting in between the Joss Sticks.
The Internet has never been a good Medium from a UI point of view. We've always just worked around it. The difference is that in the past it was bad because it was left to some programmer who went with what was most convenient or had the flashiest new effect that they wanted to try out. Now people actually pay some consultant to tell them what to do. And those consultants seem to be having a competition as to who can get their clients to install the worst possible User Interface. I believe Satan is already collecting a shortlist of contenders as we speak...
These "expert" designers are just full of hot air, they are bullshit artists, peddling their garbage wares. Very good sales techniques for an absolutely bottom of the barrel product. It's the "if Apple does it, so can we" mentality.
This is exactly what I do. A landscape 27" 1440p screen with a portrait 27" 4K screen. It is the promised land for coding and probably any other use case. Browsing the web in portrait at 4K (with 1.25x scaling) is a joy.
My website for square dancing is built from an SQLite database. To change something I just edit the SQLite tables and remake the website. The final result has no scripts/applets etc. Just enough style so a browser can render the pages any way it wants.
People still insist on using what is essentially a blog as a full blown ecommerce platform. You really have to go out of you way to crowbar eCommerce functionality into Wordpress just so the end customer has a management interface they are "familiar" with.
There is a huge market for shop building software. People don'tr care about most functions, they want an easy to use GUI that allows them to "design" and "create" the shop the wanted. There is a reason why shopify is so popular.
They are not UI Experts, they are advertizing experts. Take a peice of printed promotional material for some company or product and you will see the same thing. Lots of white space and sparse information. Just enough to peak the interest and get the "mark" to contact you so you can real them in. That's what's happening on the web today!
Try printing a web page, a mess. Saving it a bigger mess. Everything has to be viewed on a computer screen, convert it to anything and you get long, long continuous piece of garbage without a page break.
The problem with re flowing text and images trying to accommodate different screen layouts brings to unreadable documents, as soon as they have some strong relationship among text, graphs, images, boxes, etc.
I gave up e-readers and tablets but for reading some "throwaway" books, mostly novels, something you read once and won't feel the need to return to it anytime soon - thereby not worth to be printed on paper and occupy shelf space. Everything else is far more accessible on paper - and PDF is what is closest to it.
Our customers do ask for PDF manuals because they can print them if needed. Give the a bunch of HTML pages you can't print in any sensible way and it would be almost useless. We do have on-help today is mostly HTML, but for extensive explanation of complex features that need references to images and graphs, PDF is still better.
HTML already has a better solution than "look at page 57", it's called hyperlink. You just click on it, you get to the referenced text/media. No need to fiddle with searching for page numbers, and no need for complex software to update cross references when the page designation changes.
Just text them the links. Most voice communication methods nowadays have associated text channels as well. Mobile phones you can send with SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, etc you can just use direct messages, etc.
You're right about badly made HTML, but if you compare it to badly made PDFs, the problem is the same. In badly made PDFs, "go to page 57" means scroll for a while until you find the number 57 or try searching for the string "57" and hope this document doesn't have many numbers in it. Unlike paper where pages are clearly separate, PDFs don't always use the markup to distinguish pages and some display systems will present numbers that aren't page numbers (like screen refreshes that change based on the size of a window) like they were page numbers.
In well written HTML, you don't tell people to turn to page 57, you tell them to go to section 3.2.4 (you do structure your manuals, don't you) and you give them a link that jumps there. If necessary, you can link to specific pages, paragraphs, sentences, or whatever else you want. You may now tell me that you can do that in PDFs as well (which technically you can now, but support is still flaky for it), but a lot of PDFs don't do that just like a lot of HTML neglects the power of the language. If you write either well, they will both be fine. If you write them poorly, PDF will not only fail to save the disaster, but can make it far worse.
Sure you can have a nice navigation pane and try walking them through drilling down through the levels until they find section 3.2.4. Try talking some users through that. But often such solution like lots of pretty GUI solutions just don't scale well. When you've got 2000 entries a menu then menus are often crap. The designers of modern scroll bars need shooting (slowly) WTF was wrong with having a nice visible scroll bar with the little triangles at the top and bottom so you could manually scroll a little and click above or below the slider to go up or down more. It worked it was intuitive to lots of people but no, not modern enough, no we have to hide the bloody scroll bar and have it pop out of nowhere if you happen to hold the cursor of exactly the right pixel if you happen to know where it may be.
But it's still massively easier to just tell the user to go to page 12,384 and I've never seem a structured web document where there is a nice box where I can just type in a page number or section number. Sure being web savy you know you can go find the URL box and hand edit the URL to jump to the right place, good luck getting your maiden aunt to do that.
I buy the idea that it would be better to move away from imitation paper, writing documentation I often find that thing don't neatly fit onto fixed sized pages. I'd love to be able to create documents where pages sizes were more arbitrary for cases where I doubt people will print them, or at least have an option where I mark the end of pages for people who do want to print (all the best proof readers I've worked with work on printed out docs) and have better flow for people reading on a screen. But I'd still like page numbers as well as section number and a good index. Sadly those that pay the bills demand that in return for their money I must write using MS Word and so I'm stuck with that abomination's limitation as well as the limitations of the file format that is shipped to the end users of the docs.
Talking someone through a table of contents isn't that hard, at least no harder than having them find a page number (except in the case of the badly-designed PDFs I mentioned in my original post). It's a short number, just like the page numbers, and you can link directly to the section. If you're dealing with people who don't understand how to use a table of contents, then I'm confident in saying they'll have trouble finding a page in a PDF as well unless it's printed onto paper exactly the size the designer planned and they're treating it as a paper book.
HTML instruction manuals can be written and modified by multiple authors; and they save these authors from having to put things in a logical order; all they have to do is put in loads of links. But easy writing makes hard reading. My heart sinks when I have to use an HTML manual: I usually find myself lost in a rats nest of links, often going round in circles getting no nearer my target. It can be done well but rarely is. A document with a fixed layout forces some logic, and with judicious use of links (not lazily linking to anything that might be relevant) it's no problem to navigate.
There are tools that let multiple authors work on a document and then can publish them in multiple formats, including PDF. Usually, tools used by technical writers allow that. Source formats may be XML, SGML, whatever.
Those tools do indeed exist - but by the time a company has reached that state of enlightenment they have a team of fully trained writers who could do a decent job armed only with Windows Notepad and a good attitude.
Meanwhile, the rest are still getting their web team to handle the 300 page online help with tooling bought in for the four-colour drool-proof puff pieces that made up the company website (it's on the web, it's all the same). Upstairs, Sales are dumping pages out of Confluence (that the devs put there only after being actioned in the Scrum), desperately figuring out why, if that page has a later timestamp it seems to show an earlier design (hint: a manager did a search and replace to match "Corporate Standards"). At least getting this lot to hand their results over as PDF means you can show them that it is an incoherent mess without a logical reading order, do it better, without being told "it is a living hyperdocument, you just haven't learnt how to follow the link graph".
It also makes it very hard to "read the manual" and not miss large parts of it. I notice this with watching my sons trying to learn programming languages, where it is now much harder to learn due to the lack of proper flat manuals. They resort to watching videos which are another circle of documentation hell.
Pretty much agreed. Professionally designed documents, created by someone who understands typography and line-lengths for readability, is more often to be found in the 'PDF world' as opposed to the web one. I agree with your paper viewpoint too. Regrettably, the web-world has just turned into a sch!tt-show due to the persistent accommodation of the 'smartphone' at the primarily level.
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