Web Services and Web Technical Infrastructure

Whenever possible you should create HTML web pages that meet HTML standards (and now XHTML is the standard that W3C recommends), and which meet Section 508 accessibility requirements -- see http://www.usablenet.com/ and http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp . Institutions such as IU are required by law to comply.

Moreover, HTML normally produces small files which load quickly into browsers, presuming they don't require large graphic files. A good rule of thumb is to keep total bytes for a given Web page under 40Kb (HTML + images), since 75 percent of US users still have 56Kbps modems or slower (recent statistics reported in PC Magazine from national survey). Thus, such pages will load in 3-5 seconds typically, and no more than 10 seconds usually. Making users wait is the number one sin in Web design. See: http://www.pantos.org/atw/35542.html

PDF files (and .ram, .mpeg, .mov) files require special plug-ins, which your average user does not download (who wants to wait 45 minutes to download a 10 MB software product over a 56Kbps modem and then install?). Normal people don't do this, because it takes too long, may be intimidating, and can mess up their computers. Instead, they just hit the "back" button on their browser. See: http://www.pantos.org/atw/35542.html

Thus, PDF files should only be used sparingly and not for important stuff. If PDF files are converted directly from a word processing app, then it is NOT true they are images, as it is for scanned documents. However, PDFs will still be much larger typically than HTML equivalents, causing longer wait times or being completely inaccessible (making readers madder than hell).