设计与产品gds.blog.gov.uk
为什么 GOV.UK 的内容应以 HTML 而非 PDF 发布
Why Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF
2018 — 2019，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
英国政府数字服务团队（GDS）撰文解释为什么 GOV.UK 上的内容应以 HTML 而非 PDF 发布：HTML 更易访问、更适配移动设备、可被搜索和机器解析，而 PDF 对屏幕阅读器和普通浏览都不友好。文章多次登上 HN 首页，成为讨论政府网站设计与文档发布格式的经典参考。
为什么经久不衰：它系统论证了 HTML 优于 PDF 的可访问性与可用性理由，至今仍是推动机构以 HTML 优先发布内容时最常被引用的依据。
HN 评论精选
GOV.UK 把用户当作没有选择权的使用者，因此对可用性负有更高责任
我曾与 GOV.UK 团队合作。他们本质上像是庞大组织内部的一个创业团队，出色的成果正源于此。他们说过一句让我印象深刻的话：大多数网站面对的是客户，而我们面对的是用户。客户意味着有选择权，但 .gov.uk 没有替代品，用户无从选择，因此政府有责任把网站做得尽可能清晰、无障碍、有用。
rekshaw查看英文原文
I've worked with gov.uk. They are essentially a startup inside a huge organization, and their great work reflects that. One of the things they told me that struck me: most websites have customers, we have users. What they mean by this is that being a customer implies choice, whereas there is no alternative to .gov.uk, hence users don't have a choice. So it's gov.uk's responsibility to make their website as clear, accessible and useful as possible.
肯定其设计水准，但认为面向专业人士的深度信息呈现不足
GOV.UK 刚上线取代旧网站时，就像一线技术支持：问题在 FAQ 里就很好用，否则就没辙。许多关于运营慈善组织等方面的详细信息直接消失了，有段时间旧网站的网页存档是我的救命稻草。我觉得它后来改进了很多，但低信息密度是其刻意设计——对很多用户（尤其英语不流利者）这确实是对的，但面向专业人士的信息本可以呈现得更有用。设计层面绝对满分：布局合理、间距得当、显示几段文字不需要庞大的 JS 框架。
red_admiral查看英文原文
When gov.uk first started to replace the previous online presence, they were like first-level tech support: brilliant if your question is in the FAQ, useless otherwise. A lot of detailed information on aspects of running a charitable organisation, which I presume weren't accessed every day, simply disappeared. For a while, the web archive of the old site was my lifeline. My feeling is that gov.uk has got a lot better since, but it's low-information-density by design. This is absolutely the right thing to do for a lot of their users in a lot of cases, and doubly so when targeting users who might not speak good English for whatever reason. But I still feel that information meant for professionals could be presented in a more useful way. On the web design side, they definitely deserve 5 out of 5. Good general design, sensible spacing, not requiring a huge javascript framework just to display some text - there's so much right with this site.
从机器解析角度详述 PDF 格式的种种缺陷
PDF 似乎契合一种以打印在纸上为文档最高目标的世界观。从机器解析角度看，PDF 是噩梦：文本块可能在句中甚至词中任意断开、以任意顺序出现；空格可能用多种方式编码；码点到字形的映射也不必是纯 Unicode，可能包含自定义字体。这些都是我解析现实中 PDF 时学到的，而且这些问题完全符合 PDF/A 规范。
NohatCoder查看英文原文
PDF seems to fit a world-view where the highest objective of a document is to be printed on paper. From a machine-parsing perspective PDF files are a nightmare. Chunks of text may be broken anywhere, mid-sentence, mid-word. These chunks may appear in the document in any order. Spaces may be encoded as spaces, or they may be created a number of other ways, like by positioning chunks, or setting character spacing per character. The mapping from code point to glyph does not need to be pure Unicode, a PDF document may contain a custom font with additional glyphs. This is all stuff I learned by trying to parse a limited set of PDFs found in the wild. All of these gotchas are by the way completely PDF/A compliant.
实践者印证：把政府 PDF 转成 HTML 后更受欢迎，并以此文推动改革
我曾费力地把波士顿和马萨诸塞州政府的一些 PDF 转成 HTML，人们因为灵活性和无障碍性更喜欢 HTML 版。我的流程是用 pdftohtml 转换后编辑成 Markdown，截图插图，再用 pandoc 转成 HTML。我一直在推动从一开始就以 HTML 发布，部分就是引用这篇博客，并取得了一些成效。
nattaylor查看英文原文
I painstakingly convert some PDFs from Boston and Massachusetts government into HTML and people prefer them for the flexibility and accessibility. My workflow is to use pdftohtml then edit the result as Markdown and screenshot the figures before converting to HTML with pandoc. I have been pushing to publish in HTML from the get-go, in part by citing this blog, with some success. For example, the Massachusetts Secretary of the Office of Environmental Affairs recently published a typed letter as a raster PDF, which I converted into https://nattaylor.com/eastboston/blog/2019/3247-2017-logan-airport-espr/ from https://eeaonline.eea.state.ma.us/EEA/emepa/mepacerts/2019/sc/eir/3247%20-%202017%20Logan%20Airport%20ESPR.pdf
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