FASB Pronouncements in HTML?

July 5, 2007 10:08 PM

Accountingfilter: Does FASB provide HTML versions of their pronouncements? If no, why not?

All of the links on their website are pdf-based, as far as I can tell. If ever there was a set of documents suited to hypertext, it would be these (widely distributed and used for "serving the investing public", heavily footnoted, outline-styled, often tabular, frequent references to other paragraphs and documents, etc). It seems like such a waste to have something as mark-up-able as these documents to go languishing away in such an unwieldy format.

posted by aliasless to Work & Money (3 answers total)

Best answer: Many organizations who set standards are reluctant to have their publications based in hypertext, precisely because they ultimately have no control of the exact presentation of the "document" as an HTML file. Portable Document Format is unwieldy, slow, and a bandwidth hog, but it has the over-riding appeal of providing some guarantee of presentation consistency, especially in printing, and that's what really matters to standards bodies. Publishing only in PDF also encourages people to buy the bound versions of their publications.

[rant] The only reason PDF got as popular as it has is the incredibly broken, even silly status of the Document Object Model. If ever there was a concept that should have been stillborn, the DOM is it, and yet the W3C continues to refine it, as if they were operating on a deformed baby, to straighten its mangled limbs. And 10 years from now, Web "pages" will still all be one-sided, ethereal imaginary constructs, unhappy to assume corporeal form, and generally unsatisfactory when they must. [/rant]
posted by paulsc at 2:28 AM on July 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

Best answer: PDFs are also extremely cheap to generate, since it's a simple conversion of the PostScript files that are already generated to print the paper versions. HTML would either require a converter for PS or PDF files (not cheap and generally requires significant customization to get not-bad results) or a change in the output format of the tools used to generate the documents (usually not cheap to do well -- think of the ugliness that Word produces if you save as HTML).
posted by backupjesus at 6:05 AM on July 6, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks for these elucidative answers.
posted by aliasless at 6:09 PM on July 6, 2007