Hi Kevin
You're also touching on accessibility issues there, as well as gov
business processes, legal requirements etc etc.
One thing I thought worth raising and worth considering though is
copyright - do you even have permission to alter the format of the
document as submitted to you? US is different to us, I know, but
something to keep in mind...
We deal with multiple formats in my workplace constantly. Best approach
we find, when you can, is HTML first, PDF for print as needed. We try to
steer clear of using any file format that isn't an open standard (eg we
don't use.xls when we can use .csv) etc as it can imply inferred support
or approval for a vendor.
Cheers
Chris
On 12/1/2010 6:52 AM, Erickson, Kevin (DOE) wrote:
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
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