When is a page link not a page link?

Picture the scene: you’re happily browsing through a site, built with fast loading HTML, good CSS techniques and maybe a small amount of well placed Flash. The information you want is coming up quickly, your browser – optimized for such things – is behaving itself. Sounds idyllic doesn’t it? But all too quickly this everyday scene can turn to tragedy as you visit a site’s news and PR section, click on a normal looking link and suddenly you’re loading a PDF. Your browser stops dead as Acrobat Reader is loaded. The PDF turns out to be 300k instead of the usual 3k, so you sit waiting for it to load, with no option to cancel. Your mind spins.. how did this happen? You had no warning. It just came out of nowhere!

Eventually the PDF loads and you read it – feeling more frustrated than a few moments earlier, or you kill off your browser and start again, this time avoiding the fatal link.

All this pain can be avoided: just indicate on a link that you are downloading a PDF using a standard document icon. Or better yet, never link to a PDF as a normal link in a website – have a PDF option next to the link, or on the HTML page of the document itself.

Thank you for listening.