[Coco] [Color Computer] RE: DjVu misconceptions

[John W. Linville]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 10:57:52PM -0000, James Diffendaffer wrote:
> On Thu Jul 14 09:23:24 EDT 2005, John W. Linville wrote:

> >Here is my own (somewhat less) anecdotal evidence of obscurity:
> >
> >	Google for "djvu" -- ~980,000 hits
> >	Google for "pdf" -- ~440,000,000 hits
> 
> And a search just a minute ago shows these numbers:
> Google for "djvu" -- ~1,640,000 hits
> Google for "pdf" -- ~435,000,000 hits

> What is the magical number djvu must surpass not to be obscure anyway?
> That wasn't listed in the definition for the word.

Clearly you are humor impaired...my apologies for adding to the misery
in your life.

Still, even your own results reveals the disparity in prevalence.
The number of references to "djvu" is comparable to the number of
references to "lha"...  You could make a good argument for lha
being a good compression/archive format, but nobody uses it.  Why?
Because even if it was/is arguably better than the others, it wasn't
so much better as to overcome the fact that it was not as popular as
the alternatives.

(Please spare me the comparison to the popularity of the CoCo versus
its competitors.  Our continued allegiance to the CoCo is based as
much on emotion as on anything else.  I suspect that may be the case
for those advocating djvu as well...)

You seem to think that djvu is the up-and-coming thing.  Maybe so,
although I see no evidence of such.  The point is, you have a choice
between a standard that is overwhelmingly popular now and almost
certainly will remain broadly available, versus one that most people
have to go out of their way to view today and which may be harder to
read tomorrow.  Do you get the point?

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at tuxdriver.com