In the early summer of 1995, the Mac community was fairly small. But it dominated the publishing industry.
At the conference for Macintosh network administrators, we were all super excited about this World Wide Web thing. The potential for a while new paradigm for information publishing, from creation to distribution, for in-house corporate operations or mass media companies, it was a new medium that would make paper obsolete.
The Adobe reps were visibly exasperated by all this. They had solved this problem, years ago. You could click on any element of a PDF, and go to a different place in the current document, or open any other file on your computer. Powerful tools for graphical interactive PDF creation and editing. Even the ability to trigger AppleScript actions in response to mouse or keyboard events...
The Web, by comparison, was primitive and naive. Why was it getting all the attention?
• Because one was a document format shared between an application that creates ne one that displays, the other was a whole server/protocol/client stack.
• Because one would insist on rigidly paginating it’s content as output by the generating application, while the other defined content that would be streamed to your client and allow it to adapt the content to your display and reflow it’s (admittedly primitive-looking) text & cetera.
• Because one was designed for use within corporations to distribute documents, while the other was intended to allow collective authorship beyond corporate confines and that this consumer/researcher technology would later seep back into the corporate domain and possibly screw up their plans.
Another way to look at it: if the Adobe folks were angsty, irritable, annoyed, or otherwise flustered, it’s probably because they knew (some?) of the above (and perhaps more) and realised that they were going to have a fight on their hands.
At the conference for Macintosh network administrators, we were all super excited about this World Wide Web thing. The potential for a while new paradigm for information publishing, from creation to distribution, for in-house corporate operations or mass media companies, it was a new medium that would make paper obsolete.
The Adobe reps were visibly exasperated by all this. They had solved this problem, years ago. You could click on any element of a PDF, and go to a different place in the current document, or open any other file on your computer. Powerful tools for graphical interactive PDF creation and editing. Even the ability to trigger AppleScript actions in response to mouse or keyboard events...
The Web, by comparison, was primitive and naive. Why was it getting all the attention?