What do the acronyms PDF and HTML stand for?

A friend asked me about the acronyms PDF and HTML. I posted the answers as an FAQ at my web site http://www.okcorrell.com.

Q. What do the acronyms PDF and HTML stand for?

A.

PDF, portable document format. Dreamed up by the Adobe company, a software program called Adobe Acrobat Reader is installed on nearly all computers now, whether PC's or Apple Mac's. Almost any computer user can read a PDF document, while many users in the world can't all read Microsoft (MS) Word documents. As you may know, people with MS Word 2003 can't read documents made in MS Word 2007. When users need to “read only”, nearly all will be able to open, read and print a PDF document.



HTML, Hyper Text Markup Language is a standard format programming language used primarily for rendering by web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. When you enter a web page address in your computer, you are actually sending a request to an Internet file server that contains the data for that page. In fulfilling your request, the Internet server (aka web server) transmits the page information to your computer, coded in the HTML language. Your web browser is made to “decode” the HTML language and render it on your screen. If the page was designed properly, what you see on your screen is what the page designer intended you to see.

Here is wha the HTML paragraph above looks like in its HTML code:

HTML, Hyper Text Markup Language is a standard format programming language used primarily for rendering by web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. When you enter a web page address in your computer, you are actually sending a request to an Internet file server that contains the data for that page. In fulfilling your request, the Internet server (aka web server) transmits the page information to your computer, coded in the HTML language. Your web browser is made to “decode” the HTML language and render it on your screen. If the page was designed properly, what you see on your screen is what the page designer intended you to see.

OK Correll Business Solutions offers a variety of business solutions, tips, aides and assistance for small businesses, manufacturers and entrepreneurs.
Jim Correll has owned and worked in small businesses for the last 25 years, starting with a professional photography business in Western Kansas in the 1980’s, followed by 15 years in manufacturing, working in areas of purchasing, planning, contract administration and database management. He worked for an Internet catalog business before moving to Southeast Kansas in 2000 to become a receiving manager and later inventory manager for Amazon.com in Coffeyville. While at Amazon, Correll completed certification in the Amazon Six Sigma Black Belt program having to do with defect reduction and “relentless” process improvement toward better customer service and lower costs. He is currently the facilitator/mentor of the Successful Entrepreneur Program at Independence Community College in Independence, Kansas.

Domain Email Options, Instructions and Tips

Your hosting account with OK Correll Business Solutions includes up to 20 domain email addresses. (Additional addresses are available at a slight additional charge.) Using domain email addresses in your advertising and printed materials as well as on your web site makes you look more professional than using your hotmail, yahoo, gmail or other domain email accounts.

If I had 3 employees and myself at OK Correll Business Solutions, I might wish to have 4 email addresses:

jim@okcorrell.com

tom@okcorrell.com

nancy@okcorrell.com

susan@okcorrell.com

I also might want to have a few generic email address:

sales@okcorrell.com

info@okcorrell.com

The above would be a total of 6 domain email addresses.

There are several options available to you in using your domain email addresses. We'll present them here from easy to complicated, along with the pros and cons of each so you can make an informed decision about which is best for you.

Option 1

Option 1 involves setting up a forwarding function from each of your domain email addresses to an existing email address the user already has set up. The existing email addresses many times go to email service providers you are familiar with like yahoo, gmail, etc.

On your web hosting agreement, beside each domain email address we want to create, we list an existing email address to which the domain email address can be forwarded. From the example above, the list might look like this

jim@okcorrell.com	jim@yahoo.com
tom@okcorrell.com	tom@yahoo.com
nancy@okcorrell.com	nancy@yahoo.com
susan@okcorrell.com	susan@yahoo.com
sales@okcorrell.com	jim@yahoo.com
info@okcorrell.com	nancy@yahoo.com, susan@yahoo.com

Notice we can forward a generic email address to more than one person. Also note that if you have many forms in your web site where people can submit questions, using a generic address like "info@" means you can choose who receives the inquiries. If you have a change in personnel or job duties, you just have one place to go set up forwarding of "info@" to a different person rather than having to into each form on your site and changing the "submit to" email address.

Pros and Cons of Option 1

Pros	Cons
Easy to set up and requires no changes to your current email account.	When you send new email, it does not show your domain email address as the return email address. This may cause some confusion with your customers.
Your domain mail automatically comes to your normal "Inbox" where you can read it without having to go into another application.	Your domain email will be mixed in with whatever other mail you receive at the forwarding address.

Option 2

Everything rolls along fine after Option 1 until you call us one day, saying: "OK, we have our domain addresses printed on our materials and web site. That makes us look nice more professional than having our "yahoo" email addresses on everything. When we send email, however, it shows as coming from our "yahool" accounts rather than coming from our domain email accounts. How do we make our domain email accounts show up as "From" when we send email?

The simplest way to have email show as coming from your domain email address is to use the "Smartmail" web mail application that is include with your hosting package. In Option 2, we switch you completely away from using a forwarding email address as with option 1.

Pros and Cons of Option 2

Pros	Cons
Requires no changes to your current email account. Email just simply quits coming to it.	If you want to look at your personal mail and your business mail, you have to log onto both systems.
Emails sent to your customers will show your domain email address as the return email address.
You can check your domain email from any Internet computer without any email software. No additional set up charges.	Depending on your Internet connection speed, you may perceive a slightly slower pace with the "Smartmail" than with something like "Outlook".
The "Smartmail" interface has the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook. Your domain email will not be mixed in with any other mail you receive or send.

Option 3

Option 3 is for use in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook. With option 3, we set up an email account in the Outlook program. Similar to the forwarding of Option 1, this option allows you to send email using your domain email address as return address directly from your Outlook application (You have to remember to set the "send from" account to your domain account.) Anyone familiar with email accounts in Microsoft Outlook can set up an account to use for your domain email. If you don't have anyone like that available, we'll be happy to set it up for you for $50.00 per account. If there are several accounts to set up on multiple computers, we can quote an hourly rate that would be more economical for you. We can either come to your location or dial into your computer remotely.

Pros and Cons of Option 3

Pros	Cons
Emails sent to your customers will show your domain email address as the return email address.	Requires the addition of a new email account to your current MS Outlook application. $50.00 set up fee if we create and configure this account for you.
You can check both personal and business email from the Outlook application with which you are now familiar.	Your domain email be mixed in with any other mail you receive or send.

Ever wonder how it is that as taxpayers, we keep spending more and more money on our school system and yet our kids aren't getting any smarter? Not only are kids not getting smarter, but as a group, they are actually getting “dumber”. (The budget for K-12 schools in Kansas consumes a little over 1/2 of the entire state's operating budget. With the projected deficit of some $470m in the state budget for the next fiscal year, some discussion seems appropriate.)

The education administrators and the teacher unions always tell us that the reason they fail is that more money is needed, but they never say how much is enough. As a staff instructor at a local community college, I can tell you we see evidence of the failure every day. Many of the high school graduates require much effort and many resources on our part just to bring the students up to the competencies they should have received before being graduated from high school. (Of course, the tax payers pick up the bill for all these extra resources, too.)

John Taylor Gatto, a retired teacher in the New York City school system spent 31 years of his career frustrated with the whole system. After much research, he's figured out that the concept of compulsory schooling--in which kids are grouped by age and taught from boring, watered-down and inaccurate text books--was purposely set up in a way to keep kids from becoming "too smart".

In his book, “Weapons of Mass Instruction”, he presents his case. If you take his research at face value, you will see so many light bulbs come one; from what’s happening today, to your own experiences coming through the system. (The dumbing down of our children through compulsory schooling has been going on for over 100 years, so it has affected nearly all of us alive today.)

In one chapter, he presents examples of people that have done very well without the “benefit” of our education system. They are very smart people; they just educated themselves by means other than our system. One such example is race car driver, Danica Patrick.
“On April 20, 2008, Danica Patrick, age 26, became the first woman in big-time auto-racing history ever to win a major event. She was driving against two—time Indy 500 winner Helio Castroneves, and roared past him in the final two laps of the Motegi, Japan 300, and won going away. ‘This is about finding something you love and following through with it,’ she told reporters after the race.

“Ten year earlier, at age 16, Danica dropped out of high school and went to London, all by herself, to learn to sustain high speeds for hours at a time. You might have been in high school at 16, probably a sophomore, looking forward to a graduation far far away.”

So, if you’ve ever wondered why it is that we keep spending more and more of our money on more and more school buildings, fancy equipment and administrators, yet keep graduating kids that cannot function in society or college without extensive tutoring, take a look at “Weapons of Mass Instruction”, written in 2008. Another Gatto book “A Different Kind of Teacher” was written in 1992, just after he retired. It also provides many of the same insights.