Re: AFT -- Almost free text.

[Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>]

The value of a richer format (Word, for those who have Word, HTML, for those
who have a browser, etc) is that it can include more information. For
example, borwsers can extract the headings from an HTML page and present a
"page outline" (word does a similar thing, and did it first) that should give
a good guide to where the important parts are - a simple table of contents
with some idea of the relative importance. Or can skip over a list of items
easily. Or can extract a list of the links (many JAWS users navigate by this
technique, because they learn it early, although it isn't nearly as powerful
for reading documents as an outline view).

etc.

The worst case is that users still just get plain text. The best case is that
they get a lot more information, that was once only encoded by means of
fairly visually-oriented formatting conventions derived from paper, and have
tools that can do useful things with it.

cheers

Charles McCN

On Fri, 11 Jan 2002, Dave Mielke wrote:

  That doesn't answer my question. A simple text file is no more than a simple
  text file. It has very little inherrent formatting in it. Converting it to rtf,
  html, or even all the way to Word, can't improve on that, so why does it need
  to be done before handing it off to a Word user. What's wrong with giving the
  Windows user the plain old text file and letting Word convert it from plain
  text into its own format?

  What am I missing? Perhaps Word can't read a plain text file. If that's so,
  then I stand corrected? If it can, then why use something else to convert the
  document for it?



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
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