Just tried using a new system for postgraduate admissions at Newcastle. It’s built on top of the Universities SAP system, which means that it probably cost lots of cash and barely works. It’s taken me about a week to login. Amasingly the system seems to consist of scanning in documents and displaying them as a tiff image, surrounded by enough Javascript to ensure that it will only display with a single viewer.

I went to a talk once by Ted Nelson, during which he slagged of Acrobat. His comments were over the top, but he has a point. Transferring a printed document to screen decreases it’s usability. It’s the 21st Century people! We shouldn’t still be doing this.

Originally published on my old blog site.