Health and Safety
Executive / Commission
PDF or HTML
Contacts
A detailed 8 point breakdown of what we consider when deciding whether a document should be HTLM or PDF.
The ideal situation is that all documents are available and work for everyone. Web browsers are more ubiquitous and faster than PDF Readers, therefore more people can read HTML, and they will generally get it faster, so HTML is more accessible.
PDF documents prior to Acrobat Reader version 5 were completely inaccessible to screen readers. Adobe have vastly increased the accessibility of PDFs, but it is still not as accessible as a well structured HTML document. Please also note the point about printing and text size. HTML is more accessible than PDF.
This is relevant for two reasons.
Everybody surfing the we has an internet browser capable for reading HTML pages. The percentage of users who have Acrobat reader is estimated at around 90%[1].
Generally documents made into HTML will be smaller and download faster than PDF documents. As they open in a web browser no time is wasted loading a plug-in.
The online team use Dreamweaver to mange the web and intranet sites. This is very good at checking and correcting links in HTML documents. It does not recognise links in PDF documents. Also links in PDF documents are harder to identify and more difficult to correct. It may take a few seconds to correct a link in an HTML document, it will take a few minutes to correct a link in a PDF document.
Links in PDF documents are more prone to going wrong, more likely to not be updated when webpages move and more difficult to fix.
Please note: any file on the website or intranet site that is only linked to from a PDF is likely to be identified as an orphan (having no links into it) and removed. Never publish files that are only linked to from a PDF.
Please note: links within a PDF to other parts of the same document are OK and excluded from this rule.
The longer the document the more likely it is that someone will want to print it (see next point). PDFs are easier and quicker to create than HTML documents. While the difference is negligible when considering a two or three page document, when you are looking at 50 or 100 pages the time taken to make a PDF is much less than that taken to convert the same content into HTML.
A PDF can be downloaded once and read offline, with the user confident that they have the entire document, as a series of HTML pages this is currently not possible.
Reading on screen is harder than reading from paper. We must accept that users print content and read the hard copy. PDF was designed for electronic distribution of printed material, and so is ideal for documents that will be mostly printed and read. However, we have a printer style sheet that allows HTML documents to be printed in the brand. It also allows users to choose the font size.
See the thumbnails below for the print-out of an HSE intranet page.
Note the brand is kept, unnecessary content such as navigation is lost and the text size is adjustable. Please also note, if you have a wide image like the above and you want it all to print in portrait, then keep the width to 550 pixels or less.
Our HTML templates automatically brand any content with the current version of the corporate brand. If the document is in HTML it will always hold the latest version of the HSE brand. PDFs must be branded document by document. With 10,000 PDFs on the site, they will hold the brand they were created in.
With campaigns, or advertising material the design is as important as the content. In which case it is best to choose the format best suited to deliver that design.
Consistency is a good thing. If you have a list of links and click on them all you expect roughly the same behaviour from each link. However, we don't endorse consistency when we see it reproducing a poor decision made in the first instance.