TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: The Times Thinks Outside the Browser

Re: The Times Thinks Outside the Browser

W Howard (whoward@login3.srv.ualberta.ca)
Wed, 4 Oct 2006 04:32:14 UTC

In article <telecom25.352.3@telecom-digest.org>,
Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> wrote:

> The Times Thinks Outside the Browser; Finally, a readable online newspaper.
> By Jack Shafer

[ snip of praise for new NYT online edition ]

> Times Reader shouldn't be confused with the Times Electronic Edition,
> that admirable failure that accurately bills itself as an "exact
> digital replica" of the newsprint Times, or any of the other static
> PDF-ish treatments newspapers and magazines have experimented with.
> Times Reader exploits new software from Microsoft Windows Presentation
> Foundation to do its work, and the less I say about WPF-a subset of
> Windows Vista, Microsoft's oft-postponed new operating system-the
> better. Suffice it to say that WPF and the Times-Microsoft
> collaboration has liberated the newspaper from the design constraints
> Web browsers place on designers.

> http://www.slate.com/id/2149888/

I suppose one of those constraints is that the WWW has a set of
vendor-neutral standards, so it works on all platforms instead of just
the ones sold by Microsoft. Some people, including author Jack
Shafer, fail to understand why that is an enormous advantage.

It is also true that most of the readability advantages he claims, are
available in HTML too. Shafer's bad-mouthing of PDF also smacks of
ignorance, but then, PDF also works on most platforms.

I am surprised that any company with a lick of sense would go into
partnership with Microsoft. Most who have done that haven't survived,
and those that did (IBM, Kodak, ...) have been badly wounded by the
experience.

>> Walt

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