How many people today still think information is only valid or "serious" when represented on an A4 piece of paper?

Way too many, if you ask me.

I'm always disappointed when people push out important content as PDF documents (or much worse...I won't even name that format) attached to web pages or email messages, instead of just including the content in those web pages or messages, as a first-class citizen.

For some reason, people seem to think that information presented in A4 format has more value than the same information presented as a simple and clean web page. It is quite the opposite actually: web pages can be linked to, easily indexed, reformatted for efficient reading (thanks readability), etc.

Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, wrote in 1999 already [1]:

We must overthrow the paper model, with its four prison walls and peephole one-way links

And also, in the same paper:

WYSIWYG generally means "What You See Is What You Get" — meaning what you get when you print it out. In other words, paper is the flat heart of most of today's software concepts.

Granted, we haven't fully solved the two-way links problem yet, but I hope you get the idea. Who needs paper or A4 pages? This is 2010, and this is the Web.

Please think about it next time you publish an important piece of information. Does it really need to live in the prison walls of a "document"? In what ways is that more valid than a web page or plain text email message?

Most of the time, almost always, the answer is: it's not more valid, it's just less usable.

Can I haz web? kthxbye.

[1] http://people.artcenter.edu/~vanallen/web_techniques/tednelson_liberate.htm