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Re: multiple file formats

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Dec 27, 2006 6:50AM

On Tue, 26 Dec 2006, Cheryl Amato wrote:

> What is the best way to handle multiple formats of the same file.

I think this topic has been discussed in the list, though it might have
been some other forum.

> Currently they are presented in a three column table. The columns are
> file name, PDF and Word. Is making this table a data table sufficient?

No, it's not the right approach. To begin with, how would you name the
links? You would have hard time in writing descriptive link texts that are
unique within a page.

> My concern is that users navigating from one link to another will not
> understand as all they'll get is "Word" or "PDF" - not the file name.

That's one of the problems indeed.

Since a user probably prefers either PDF or Word for each document - they
have _different_ accessibility problems, and the relative impact of
problems depends on the user and his environment - the natural solution is
to have two pages, linked together, one containing links to the documents
in Word format, the other in PDF format. You could then use natural names
of the documents as link texts, since link names need not be unique across
pages.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/