Adobe Acrobat, Common Ground, DOCmaker, and even HTML, the tag-cluttered language of the World-Wide Web. This is progress, right? Nothing beats fonts, styles, graphics, sounds, movies, and the promise of teledildonics, right?
Not so fast. In my (admittedly humble) opinion, the ideal format for electronic publishing is text: straight text, plain text, ASCII -- call it what you want.
I can hear gasps of horror from those interested in "progress," especially those heavily into graphic design, electronic audio, or desktop video. I don't dispute that graphics may be lovely, audio stentorian, and video breathtaking. But those aren't what electronic publishing is all about.
So what is it about, then?
Readers. The conveyance of information from a publisher to a reader.
The goal, in my eyes, is to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to read, hear, view, or otherwise experience my information.
Words both convey information and inspire the imagination. I can imagine and describe a scene far faster and cheaper than effects wizards in Hollywood can create it, and I'll bet I can do it faster than those spiffy new 3-D rendering and video editing packages too.
But hey, I'm not even talking about literature here, I'm talking about more prosaic publications. Consider this: take a publication and eliminate every design element, but leave all the text intact. The result might be pretty ugly, but I'm willing to bet that almost all of the information in that publication has been accurately conveyed.
Conversely, if you rip all the text out of a publication and leave all the design elements intact, you won't even be able to determine the name of the publication, much less what's in it. The point is that the text of a publication is of paramount importance.
One problem in the electronic world is that our various types of computers don't understand the same file formats. But, they do understand ASCII, and since it's so universal now it's likely to be supported for years to come. Perhaps you don't care whether your publication is totally unreadable in ten years, but if you're related to an archivist like I am, you do care about the future.
But let's not stop there: some people are color blind, and others simply don't see small text well. With an ASCII publication, readers can easily adjust the display to match viewing preferences. Some designers absolutely hate to give readers this power, and although I won't argue that good design can improve readability, to the naysayers I have but one word: Wired. I just love reading yellow text reversed out of a picture.
One final example. ASCII text can be turned into Braille or read out loud by a speech synthesizer like the Macintosh PlainTalk technology. Just try that with 95 percent of the specialized formats out there!
File size doesn't much matter in a world of fast connections, but in the real world, people think twice about downloading a 600K file that contains the same amount of text (but additional graphics and layout) as a 30K text file. The goal in publishing is to disseminate information, not to restrict it to those with fast connections or patience.
In the end, friends, I come not to bury these specialized formats, these over-evolved and inflexible residents of the electronic plains, but to praise the grande dame of information communication: the humble word, as represented in the least common denominator of ASCII text. No one should pretend that a world without color, sound, and pictures would be a good thing, but in the world of electronic publishing those things often do little more than enhance the text, often at what I consider too great a cost. If what you have to say is important, people will listen -- will read -- without the trappings.