I don't see PDFs being something lazy. For my companies specsheets it would be almost impossible to recreate them in HTML. I do agree with the popup issue though.

Anything that breaks the web surfer's flow is bad. PDF's are often big files, hard to navigate, and you have to wait for the stupid plugin to load.

There are software products that convert pdf's to html. I'm sure some do it better than others, and even if you had to tweak hundreds of converted spec sheets, I think it would be worth the effort. Then going forward, you'd just have to 'html-ize' new spec sheets.

We're an engineering firm with a small budget and staff. There is no way in hell I'd have the time for anything like this. Our customers have overwhelmingly said they actually prefer the PDF files anyway since they are easily printable from anywhere they can download them. Many of our products are used in the field.

How does a PDF break a flow? When they get to the PDF, there is still a "back" button available just as with any page. Anyone who comes to our site more than likely already knows what they are coming for.

I think some people are a little to high on this "ya gotta be strict" thing.

PDF's are nice, but someitmes people abuse the privilege. One problem with PDFs - they're not searchable, i.e. the index robots won't index them and if you're putting bulk of your data into PDFs - nobody would be able to find them.

I guess the important thing is to use PDFs where it makes common sense. If you need a copy of a document or brochure that needs no indexing by search engines - certainly PDF makes sense. But if you have part fo the site that need to be shown - do it in HTML instead of a Word Document converted to PDF - that would be lazy.

My only real issue with PDFs is that they are rarely labled. So I go to click a link that I'm interested in and *bang* I'm hit with that damn acrobat reader plugin trying to take over my browser. Thankfully this is less of a problem now due to my net-boyfriend Firefox.

We use a search tool on our site from Atomz that searches PDFs and just so you know, Google does indeed index PDFs and has for some time.

PDF is searchable... They are indexed and could be optimized.