Comment by Gemma posted on on 20 July Hello, you say "We want to hear from you. I'm a government statistician, and we produced our statistics in HTML for the first time recently. They look a lot better than in a PDF, and they're more accessible. When might we expect this on gov. Comment by James Smith posted on on 19 July As a very frequent use of gov. They also seem to have been written by far more competent members of staff, and the web content which is often rushed and incomplete. It is also crucial in my role as a tax advisor to take the CURRENT advice or interpretation of tax legislation, and tag that to a client file when giving advice, as when a tax investigation occurs, which may be as long as years after having given that advice the current document will inevitably have been changed in that time.
So having to output HTML text to a "jumbled" export is not good form. This is all saved electronically, but PDF's are much easier. Comment by Roger posted on on 18 July Excellent post Neil and I agree with you about the 'ingrained print culture and outdated content production processes. Comment by Neil Williams posted on on 24 July Thanks for your comment, Roger. Comment by Nathan Dolan posted on on 18 July I agree with most of what you have said here with respect to using HTML for content delivery, and many services especailly gov.
PDF is the de-facto standard for electronically signed documentation. HTML looks different on different devices and browsers today, let alone in 25 years. I have to disagree with you strongly here Neil. Saving as HTML is a terrible idea. Anything saved is potentially broken the moment your web session expires, because it typically doesn't embed content; it links to it.
Even for basic static content, the sands will shift over time links changing and such like. HTML that renders now may well not render tomorrow. This is why very few users would ever save as HTML in my experience.
For most users, this sucks less than saving as HTML, so they do this. Is your June bank statement out of date because it's now July. Especially legally significant ones. You just need to tag the structure. This is entirely analogous to HTML. HTML is great for but sucks for documents. PDF sucks for content but is great for important documents.
For important documents, services should create proper archival, accessible tagged PDF documents, ideally signed with a verifiable by a TA corporate signature using PAdES.
Hi Nathan, Thanks for your well-reasoned comment! Links can and do change, we try to avoid this by using redirects wherever possible, but the same is true of links from PDFs too. As it stands, that method preserves the words and hierarchy of a page, rather than the decorative elements. There are also more variables in both the software used by the producers, and the readers. Taking the time to make them properly accessible and test does just that. Our publishing software is more of a controlled environment, so we have a greater chance of making sure our HTML pages are accessible to all.
Comment by Josh Levett posted on on 18 July It makes the PDF editions of documents look like the preferred version as they get the official-looking cover preview. In addition - could the GOV. Comment by Pete Hewitt posted on on 18 July Really interesting comments on some of the potential pitfalls and how to fix them but this is definitely the way to go.
Is it essentially the same as a normal web page editing screen or can it suck content in from Word or such like and format from there? As Higher Ed is another guilty party when it comes to endless PDFs this is something we'll need to tackle in the near future but working out the exact workflow will be a challenge.
Comment by Jason Rogers posted on on 18 July Capturing content for use offline is more or less impossible. UK creates would be a first step. Remember that sometimes people are not online - and this is way more often then you might think. Many, many people still prefer the printed page. They may even print documents to read long form to avoid the problems of extended screen use. UK does nothing to address this - trying to print the html pages results in comically large text with no attempt to format content in page form.
It also wastes reams of paper. The ethos for the site seems to focus on accessibility first - whilst forgetting just how unusable this can make content. Text size way is too big - this hampers readability rather than improving accessibility. Better yet, have a choice of style sheets to render the content at normal size rather than like an infants reading book. HTML, and worse, coupled with poor design choices like here, is nowhere near this level The PDF haters need to think about why people find them so useful.
There are definitely times when paper is best, and there is a place for PDFs where there is a proper reason for them we only listed the common ones. We have a responsibility to make GOV. UK available for everyone, and we work towards making it accessible for the greatest number of people.
Large text is easier to read, but does require more scrolling. On balance, it helps more people than it hinders. Comment by Harry Lund posted on on 17 July It's quite cumbersome to work through an intermediary on a document undergoing frequent revisions, so people tend to wait until the final version is ready before looking into creating an HTML version - at which point you can be timed out, so just go with the easy PDF version.
I'd love to see lots more people trained up to be publishers. And indeed I've been trying to sign up for the training myself, but have been told no courses are currently planned. Comment by Neil Williams posted on on 17 July Thank you for all of these comments. I agree with many of the pro-PDF points being made here. They have their uses, and where that's the case we would recommend publishing both in HTML and PDF and we will at some point add a feature that happen automatically from our publishing software.
The problems come when PDF is the only format on offer - that's the behaviour I would love to confine to history. Agree also with points on version control. I should have made it clear in my post that GOV. UK has features to track versions of HTML content, through the 'page history' at the foot of each page which includes notes about what has changed.
We store the entire content of all past versions of HTML pages in our database and intend in future to make that whole rich history available through our API.
The same is not true of PDFs, which can be overwritten using the same file name, without retaining history of changes other than by comparison with offline copies.
Comment by David Tallan posted on on 19 July We are starting to hear more and more frequently from librarians and archivists who are concerned about the long term impacts of this in terms of preserving the government record.
They share the concerns that Nathan raised above that "HTML is not in any way a long-term archival format. What is GOV. UK doing to support long term preservation of the record? Is the assumption that everything will always be accessible to researchers and scholars of the future through the current platform or its descendants? Or are materials regularly copied for long term preservation elsewhere?
If the latter, do you find HTML a challenge for that? Comment by R K Hayden posted on on 26 July As noted by others, PDFs are good for reading offline. And by offline, I still mean on-screen, not on paper. For documents that if published as html would be spread over many html pages, a single PDF file also provides an easily searchable document.
You should be providing users with the option to access documents in a range of open formats. Now as you may already know, HTML is quite an easy format to create. You can easily publish your free newsletter using various easy to use free software tools out there.
And it's easy to send out your content as an HTML email, so your subscribers can easily ready your articles the instant they open up your email. The only downside is, HTML content looks usually different on various operating systems and email clients.
The table designs may be twisted and messed up. The fonts as well. So you never know in which weird form your subscribers are going to see your newsletter this time.
Another option for the format of your published content, is a plain text design. But that one is more simple and based on all the modern graphic design nowadays, it might be just too boring and simple to catch the attention of your audience.
Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory. It is not possible to include clickable hyperlinks, and clickable hotspots, in an e-mail message.
Some e-mail clients will automatically convert an Internet address to a clickable link, but this can not be guaranteed. There is no good way to measure how many actually read the newsletter.
Useful tips for those of you that write your own newsletters. How to create a newsletter that increase sales. Free Newsletter Templates for Email Marketing. Newsletters, and other type of e-mails, can be sent in two different formats: HTML or plain text. Marketing and information professionals often face the question of which format to choose for their newsletter. There is no easy answer to this question, because both HTML format and plain text format have its advantages and disadvantages.
Before making a decision, both formats should be carefully considered and compared. This article will describe some of the advantages and disadvantages of an HTML newsletter and a plain text newsletter.
HTML newsletter - Advantages It is possible to design an attractive and appealing newsletter that really makes the reader react and take action. I think you missed the biggest con: Without a PDF viewer integrated in the browser i. PDFs take more time to be updated and, if downloaded by the user, can't be updated at all. Not sure I follow, but broadly speaking, one could argue most of the web is forms based on some level.
The text is in a specific page format, which works decently on large computer screens, but is terrible when viewed from a 7" vertical mobile screen — Cullub.
Show 7 more comments. Good for maintaining a precise formatting for printing That's really the sole benefit online. DA01 DA01 On WIndows, I think you're right On my PC, it's an option in all browsers, but I don't know if that's due to office or what.
It basically does everything PDF does, depending on the CSS and fonts available, although the general serif and sans-serif distinctions should be more than adequate for simple, professional documents. Plus, its source can be edited and you don't need to spend hours in overly complex applications like InDesign just to make the simplest changes. In particular, HTML is not self-contained, but requires a whole zoo of additional files.
Also, HTML does not ensure integrity of contents nor integrity of presentation. HTML does have a reason to be in cases where neither of those integrities nor the self-containedness matters. That would be for simplistic presentation of information, without being legally binding, for example. PDF--other than the legal system is still woefully behind the times and still prefers paper. I have to side with Mark, HTML is preferred most of the time over PDF--except, as you state, when for whatever reason, it has to act like a printed piece.
Show 2 more comments. Max Wyss Max Wyss 2 2 bronze badges. I think many of your arguments are equivalent to my "it's in one file" point.
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