FW: Adobe CEO interview

[Daniel Emory]

--- mcarr at allette.com.au wrote:
> As far as a device that you can comfortably and
> safely use in the tub is
> concerned, I don't think that paper will be the
> delivery method of the
> future.
========================
It’s estimated that 40% of the US adult population is
non-literate, which means they don’t read books or
newspapers. This has been accompanied by a rapid
decline in the ability of college students to write a
half-way decent paragraph in English. The California
State College system, the largest in the nation, takes
almost any applicant who got through high-school
degree with half-way decent grades. But about 40% of
its first year students are not capable of doing
college-level work, and thus their first year is
dominated by remedial classes in English, Math and
other subjects they should have mastered in high
school.

These declines all coincide with the growth of the
internet, and the shift from obtaining knowledge from
paper books to learning from feeble snippets of
on-line text. The blogosphere, dominated by those who
are at least competent in the English language,
consists mainly of opinions unsupported by any factual
basis.

When you read tomes from the 1990’s extolling the
promise of hypertext to change the way people think
and use information, (I recommend the
“Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook by Berk and Devlin),
you begin to realize that it’s promise was still-born.
The hypertext pioneers envisioned a rich panoply of
link types that would create hypertexts which were
true “searchable mazes” Frame Technology, beginning in
FrameMaker 4, added a rich variety of hypertext link
types which would have realized that original vision.
When Adobe took over FrameMaker, it could have carried
out that vision by implementing all of the FrameMaker
link types in PDF. It failed to do so. And so, the
HTML standard, with only the most primitive hypertext
link type, became the standard. There was some hope
that the XML standard would have rich linking
capabilities. It added a few additional link types,
but nowhere near enough to realize the original
promise of hypertext.

The result is that most online help documents are
shovelware. I wrote an article about that, “Thoughts
About On-Line Help”, about 6 years ago. It’s still
available at:

http://www.microtype.com/resources/articles/Oldocs_DE.pdf

Although I would probably add some additional concepts
and ideas if I wrote that article today, I still stand
by most of what’s stated there. In particular, I stand
by my statements in that article about the many
advantages of paper books (or PDFs which faithfully
replicate the format and layout of well-designed paper
books).

Getting back to what I state in the first two
paragraphs above, I maintain that the ability to
acquire in-depth knowledge of a subject is a
discipline which is difficult to master. And I have no
doubt that well-written, well-organized paper books,
particularly on difficult subjects, will continue to
be the best way to acquire real, in-depth knowledge of
a subject, and subsequently serve its owner as a
valuable reference source. If the internet (and other
vehicles of on-line content) continues to serve mainly
to encourage an undiscipplined pseudo-approach to real
learning, it will remain a major cause of rising
non-literacy.

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