Netscape dead? Mozilla cut loose from AOL? These seem to be the latest developments today, only two weeks after Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1 came out (and a few days after Moz1.5a started). The word is that Netscape is being dismantled and everyone has been fired. Daniel Glazman is one of those cut adrift. Expect to see more stories of woe soon.

Mozilla has apparently already reorganized itself as a non-profit corporation, complete with a brand-new, much improved website. It looks like they’ve been expecting this for a while. First impressions are that I love the new website, it’s something they’ve needed for a while. But to lose the support of AOL (even though AOL has pledged $2million in support) and all those paid employees will certainly be a blow to the movement. Where this will go still remains to be seen. Certainly more able prognosticators than myself will soon start chiming in.

Apache, and by extension Unix and Linux, are still the big winners in the web server market. The Netcraft Web Server Survey for June, 2003, shows 26 million out of 42 million sites, nearly 2/3, are being run on Apache. Microsoft might be a powerful force in many other sectors, but I don’t think they’ll ever gain prominence in web server territory. Their percentage has actually been falling this year, as these charts show.

Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox column is a real “Well, duh” article about PDFs.

PDF is good for printing, but that’s it. Don’t use it for online presentation.

Is Jakob repeating himself here? It seems like I’ve read this same thing from him four or five times now. Maybe he keeps coming back to the same topics because there’s always new people getting into the field, and he wants to make sure they hear the same messages. After all, if somebody just subscribed to Alertbox last week, this is new information to them! To the rest of us, it reads like something he tossed off Sunday night because he realized a deadline was coming up.

The message is solid, though. PDFs are bad for reading on screen. I’ve seen a couple of PDFs that had an almost-square page that fit just right onto the screen. Seth Godin’s 99 Cows is one. But even then, PDFs still work with the concept of a limited size “page”. If each “chunk” is small, it works well. In 99 Cows, each “cow” is less than one page in length. So you can click through from 1 to 99 and find one per page. If the chunk is larger, you run into paging issues. In 99 Cows, the introduction runs long and has to be spread over three pages. That’s fine if it’s a printed material, but this book is meant to be read on the computer. It’s even full of hyperlinks to web pages. I suppose it would have been possible to put the introduction on one page that measured 8.5″x18″. But then that would have gotten confusing. There are no easy answers in PDF.

With printing, you don’t have a choice about page size, since your book or magazine is only so many inches big. Most content can’t be shoehorned into that form easily, so you need to spread one chunk of information over several pages. But when you’re reading on screen, and especially on a website, HTML is very attuned to the concept of “unlimited scroll”. You may still want to break your content into several pages (Jakob advocates this religiously, because “users don’t like to scroll”), but on the Web you can break it at a certain number of paragraphs, or break it up by section, instead of being forced to have a break every 11 inches. That is one of the advantages of the Web, that the form can adapt to fit the content, instead of the other way around. PDFs do away with that advantage, so there is no reason, aside from laziness, to deliver material meant to be read on screen in a PDF.

And of course, at the end of the day Jakob has to be Jakob, so he titled his article “PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption”. When you’ve built a name on sensationalism, why stop now?