Innovative email II - File format

By Erik van Kempen | January 4, 2008

Just a day after I posted my wish for 2008, a new and innovative email system, Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror posted an interesting article about the trouble with PDF.

I proposed Adobe's Portable Document Format to be the defacto new standard file format for email messages, but maybe another new or existing packaged format would be better. Jeff describes the fact that a lot of documents that are published as PDF could be published using HTML and CSS, because they do not really need the formatting possibilities of PDF. He also makes clear that PDFs are quite difficult to search through without special software. As HTML is plain text, it's easier to scan the contents.

The main point of using a packaged format is because you are able to embed objects, like fonts and images, in a single file. Maybe a good alternative could be XML Paper. This packaged document format was developed by Microsoft and based on XAML. It has the same pros (like embedded fonts) as PDF offers, but contains plain XML for the textual content.

Alternatively, Adobe is working on a similar format: Mars. This format is an XML-based next-generation PDF alternative. Let's wait and see how this works out in the near future.

Read more about PDF, XML Paper and the pros and cons of both:

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