MPs’ expenses… or how PDF files will kill the web
October 21st, 2004The House of Commons have released a full summary of MPs expenses for the first time, which is good, a nice small step to further transparency and happiness.
But the format they choose for the expense tables, inexplicably, is in Adobe PDF format. Why? They’re just bloody tables for God’s sake. HTML or XHTML would have been fine.
I ask this as I think it would be great to integrate the data from this with stuff from the excellent They Work For You website, say, so we can keep track of what our MPs say and what they spend the money we give them on.
PDF makes it much tougher to extract and export the data contained therein in whatever format we choose (which we have the right to, as citizens who stump up the cash). Perhaps this is one of the reasons why they used PDF, so it’s harder (though by no means impossible) to re-render. This perhaps sums up why I dislike PDF so much - not only as the files are bloated and slow to render, but it takes all the shit features of paper and foists them upon electronic media. XHTML documents are quicker to load, are much more parseable and re-renderable. By being more flexible, they have the potential to be more accessible and user-friendly (though admittedly not everyone follows this, but the point is at least the potential is there). Rather than have the formatting data act as a mere guide to page rendering that is separate from the content therein, PDF takes the anal, paper-based design view that everything must be exactly in its place, conflating style and content, and forcing the author’s formatting upon the user. Oh, and the format is proprietary rather than open standards.
PDF turns online information from a accessible and usable format into nothing much better than pieces of paper. Which is fine if all you want to do is print it out, but online they are a shoddy way of providing information that does not do the web justice. And with the addition of the ability to include hyperlinks and form fields in more modern versions of PDF, Adobe are making an attempt to further attempt at attacking XHTML’s position as format of choice for the web. Can you imagine a web where every site was in PDF? Ack.
Anyway, enough ranting for one day, I’ll stop now…
October 22nd, 2004 at 00:03:39
And you think publishing them as PDFs will stop us?
:o)
It is a right royal pain in the bum, though.
- Tom, one of the TheyWorkForYou.com volunteers
October 23rd, 2004 at 22:00:08
You may hate PDF but what you are talking about is more a problem with the use of the things than with the format itself. PDF is used when you want something which can be printed out or stored on your own computer, which is difficult with HTML if you want to actually make it look good. The alternative would be to use something like word files, which would turn out differently on almost every system you look at them on, and be even more proprietary.