Amiga Report Format Change

As some of you will notice already, Amiga Report has made its long-awaited shift to a graphical HTML version.

When first announced at the beginning of the year, it was thought that the Amiga Report editorial staff would be able to continue producing simultaneous AmigaGuide and HTML versions of the magazine. However, due to the work required, and the amount of pride we have in the new HTML appearance, this will not be the case.

1997 will be the last year in which an AmigaGuide Amiga Report will be produced. This is not a decision we make lightly, but these factors helped us make our decision:

1. | The HTML version looks much better than the AmigaGuide, and more easily allows us to present information (including better tables, picture integration, and other enhancements) in a much more pleasing form.
2. | The vast majority of input we've had about the appearance of Amiga Report encouraged an HTML version wholeheartedly.
3. | Any Amiga with a configuration even approaching "modern" is capable of running a minimal HTML browser. Demo versions, some with surprisingly few limitations, are available free. Magazines give them away on their CD-ROMs like crazy. They are, in short, not difficult to find.
4. | For the small percentage of AR readers who have access to neither an AmigaGuide reader or an HTML online viewer (for the current text-only HTML conversion), it would seem that the inconvenience of reading the magazine in HTML is only slightly more than the inconvenience of reading an AmigaGuide file as plain text.
5. | Amiga Report's release schedule has not been very commendable over the past year. We know this. Requiring us to produce two different versions on two totally different design paradigms would make matters worse. (In AmigaGuide, the tendency is to squash many files into one. In HTML, the idea is to make as many things independent files as possible. This is inconvenient for making two versions from the same source material.)

We hope that you will be understanding about this change, and that this advance warning will allow the minority sector of readers without HTML viewers to seek one out before the permanent change is made.

The Amiga Report mailing list will distribute AR HTML as a series of files, due to the restraint many systems impose on incoming mail. Most likely, AR will be distributed as an archive of text-only files, with graphical archives following. The archive to be placed on Aminet will of course contain all the necessary files in one .lha file, since the restriction is not the same.

We hope all of you will be as excited by the new Amiga Report as we are. For as long as the AmigaGuide version lasts, the mailing list will be used exclusively for the AmigaGuide version--the HTML versions can be obtained from Aminet or other participating distribution sites.

Jason Compton
Editor in Chief, Amiga Report

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