Technorama

Have you checked into the ISO Standard for archiving yet? It includes information on why current HTML renderers may be transitory, the difficulties of many package formats, more:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=38920

You may want to check into the actual screenreader story for PDF files too... here's an entrypoint:
http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/

jd/adobe
 

John, Thanks for the links, I looked at the ISO draft. Couldn't spot an HTML rendering section, but yes I agree that HTML layout is often transitory because it is not fully prescribed. This means a reflow of the document is possible for a small mobile screen. Opportunity to display the document in a different layout is a great asset IMHO. Page size guidance could be included in the WebDoc meta data, so users could view in the original format if their screen was suitable.

Going onto the related topic of PDF:
Reprocessing documents in open text based formats is very easy, which is another reason XHTML is a good option for my WebDoc proposal. PDF import and decomposition into a different format is more difficult in my experience, and even then the results are far from equivalent.

Take for example the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, it would be great to convert this into a commentable wiki on QuickTopic. However, using the tools available results in a document which has spaces within words and line-wrapped text. Perhaps some of the original mark-up is lost when it is converted to PDF. Unfortunately even Adobe's Online PDF to HTML Converter was also unable to convert the Gowers PDF into HTML. Using Adobe Reader and copying and pasting the contents into OpenOffice loses all the images and font colours.

Perhaps this is just a problem with tools not being able to decompose the PDF document fully? There do not appear to be as many PDF editing tools as there are XHTML.

The other problem I have seen is that the PDF minor version number is incremented almost yearly. When it is changed, viewers like KPDF and Xpdf display corrupted text until they are updated (viz. Power Inquiry Executive Summary). XHTML is a locked standard.
Jon