.odt, .pdf, .doc? No, no, no... .html!

[Agent-X]

.html should be the preferred document creation language.

Would you agree or disagree?

I assume that it has limitation, but if given the ability to have margins altered through print properties--and the ability to have page numbers with some other programs--it is the best language to view and share documents.

[apoorv_khurasia]

Why this debate? In the ancient times I guess the fight would have been over which paper to use for legal documents....can't we just stick to whatever is the use and demand and protocol?

[rudie_rage]

I like .rtf myself. Clear and simple, works across OS's (win and linux, at least) and dosnt have all these silly borders, tables, bells, and whistles.

I guess in some cases they are needed, but I really think there is something said for keeping things simple.

HTML does seem like a good way to keep things standard, especially since there are already tools to convert most things to HTML. Although I think some web-standards enthusiasts would be grinding their teeth watching their content-only markup language used for such elaborate visualizations :P

[fingal]

I have to deal with a lot of different electronic document formats, and I see these as something like the blades in a Swiss army knife. Some - pdfs for example - are useful for sharing via e-mail. Text is good for simplicity where layout is less important ... I see the *.doc format as more commercialised and less useful across different platforms. It's okay for sharing documents with very small groups of people.

My instinct would be to avoid using html as the preferred choice. It's only a markup language, and there are rather a lot of these! Of course it's useful, but as some browsers (and we know which ones!) don't fully comply with html standards, perhaps using it would be a backwards step.

Text files are good, but they can change layouts when shared via certain e-mail clients. I know this well as I do it every single week when I mail out our company newsletter. You would think, 'Text files are simple', and they are ... but they still cause problems that you wouldn't think of.

There's tension between creating good layouts and sharing out documents among large groups of recipients ... Say several thousand people each time you do a mail merge. You'll aways get a few thousand failed deliveries and people complaining that, 'We can't read your text file!!'

[Vergil83]

I have to agree with apoorv_khurasia and fingal. Different situations need different tools. There is no way I hell I am going to write a long document with in complex formating in html when there are other markup languages that can held it 1000x times easier (I am thinking of LaTeX for example). Sometimes you need something that looks exactly the same everywhere. PDF is perfect for this.

[fingal]

... the subject is quite close to my heart Vergil. I'm currently involved in redesigning our company newsletter, and for years this has been a text file delivered via e-mail. The beauty of text files is ... very easy to share around. After all, who can't read a text file? Well, spam filters don't like them, and sometimes quite innocent words can get filtered out as pr0n. . Some rough figures for you:

16,000 newsletters ... Out of these:

2,000 delivery failures
1,500 'Sorry, not in the office' messages
400 'Spam ... under quarantine' messages.

In fact, the content of a document can sometimes dictate the medium used to deliver it. So html is good for documents with hyperlinks (our preferred format at work in future). As you rightly say, pdfs are good for preserving layout.

So yeah ... use the right tools for the right jobs. When faced with real world decisions you can see how useful it is to have so many choices. It's like choosing the right golf club.

PS: I don't play golf.

[Cabhan]

I would have to say PDF as the preferred distribution format myself. The main reason for this is that there is no ambiguity or implementation-dependent formatting. Further, PDFs are very simple to generate: Linux and Mac OS X can both natively print to PDF, and programs like OpenOffice can export to it cross-platform. I'm also a huge fan of LaTeX, another cross-platform, open source technology that lets you create well-formatted documents pretty easily.

HTML, obviously, is EXTREMELY implementation-dependent, even amongst standards-compliant browsers (each browser has its own default styles).

Plain text is obviously universal, but has the disadvantage of lacking any sort of formatting. The argument of whether this is ultimately a good or a bad thing can be left for another time, but the fact is that in many cases (and particularly in a corporate environment), formatting can count for a lot.

As far as other rich text formats: RTF can work (as far as I know, there is generally widespread support for it), but it is limited in what formatting it supports. ODF would probably be okay depending on the audience, but its support is pretty much limited to OpenOffice and other Linux word processors currently. DOC and OOXML are in a similar position, except the opposite, in that they appeal to the Windows side more. These formats do have the drawback of fonts, however. For instance, creating a document with a font that a recipient does not have will lead to the system using a different font, and thus appearing quite different (as I discovered when I created an ODF on Linux and tried to open it on my Mac in NeoOffice).

Overall, as far as universal support, uniform appearance cross-platform, and full range of formatting capabilities, PDF seems the victor in my mind.