Kevin, This query opens a much broader discussion about the convergence of web content management systems and document management systems, and the appropriate use of various applications to present and format information for various media. Word, pdf etc are often used as presentation applications for information on screen, rather than presentation applications for printed information.
This often leads to storage and maintenance of two parallel files - print and screen. A more appropriate solution would be the maintenance of a single (say XML) file tagged for use with templates for multiple presentation environments and purposes - the same information could be used to create a wallet quick reference card, full instruction manual, media release, or full screen web and mobile. The basic problem in the question below seems to be the appropriateness of the information formatting tool for the presentation purpose. Kind Regards, Peter Hislop -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Erickson, Kevin (DOE) Sent: Wednesday, 1 December 2010 6:52 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [WSG] Document Formats Hi All, The website I work with receives a lot of documents to be posted that come in the form of Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents. And now, with the release of the latest versions of Ms Office, they are coming to me with an "X" on their extensions. I have information in the footer of all the web pages for access to free viewers for all documents including these latest extensions. This may be an adequate CYA but I am not convinced it is the best practice. I know this must be confusing for some of our visitors. I would like to ask any of you if you have had to deal with multiple document formats and how you handled this for the best user accessibility. I am thinking the best practice is to have, first, a browser/HTML version, second, a PDF version, and after that whatever version the document was created as, i.e. Ms Word, PowerPoint, etc. Example: <ul> <li> Title <a href="info.html" title"Title Web Page"> (Web Page)</a> <a href="info.pdf" title"Title in PDF Format"> (PDF)</a> <a href="info.docx" title"Title in MS Word Format"> (Word)</a> </li> </ul> Thank you very much for sharing your experiences on this, Kevin ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [email protected] ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [email protected] *******************************************************************
