[DOC-SIG] Library reference SGML plan / size of supplied documentation

[Guido van Rossum]

[me]
> > While I agree that PDF has advantages over Postscript, what drives me
> > crazy is people putting up documents on the web in PDF format. for
> > online viewing.  What's wrong with this?  It puts PAGE BREAKS in the
> > middle of paragraphs.  Page breaks are a print media feature.  I don't
> > want page breaks in document I'm viewing on line -- the printed paper
> > page size has no relationship on my screen.

[Bill]
> While I agree with this in spirit, there is an incredibly long and
> illustrious history of page-oriented rhetorical science (art?).  PDF is
> a good Net way to make use of this science, though I agree that it's
> irritating.  I'd rather have things adapt to the size and shape I give
> them, if it doesn't matter to the author.
> 
> Reminds me again of the Halasz split between "card sharks" (people who
> like card (and page) oriented hypertext) and "holy scrollers" (people
> who like endless-scrolled-document style hypertext).  HTML has made us
> all holy scrollers whether we like it or not...

I'm not a big fan of endless scrolling (in fact this is at the moment
my main gripe with my own Python website :-) but if I get separations
I want the separations to be semantically meaningful.  Page oriented
hypertext presumably does this.  The typical PDF document however is
created by using a wordprocessor to produce an endless scrolling
document, automatically producing a page lay-out for a particular
paper size, and then extracting PDF...

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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