Nathaniel Whittemore

Spreadsheets are tabular.

PDFs are paged.

Each one forces a structure onto every reader in the order that it was written.

Now, sometimes that's the goal, but knowledge work tends not to be consumed by one generic reader in one linear setting.

People arrive with different questions in different amounts of time.

A website can organize that same material in a variety of different ways.

By topic, by role, by urgency, by depth.

It allows for dynamism in the consumption.

The exec reads the summary, the analyst jumps straight to the evidence, someone else searches the glossary.

And all that happens without everyone having to read your table of contents.

Now, so far, we've just been talking about single documents as if they exist alone.

But a lot of knowledge work has context that lives across multiple different types of documents.

The charts in a spreadsheet, the explanations in a memo, the sources in a browser tab, the decisions in an email thread.

An HTML site gives you a much more dynamic environment to layer context together.

You can ship everything that used to be spread across four or five different places all with one single URL.

And what's more, the shipping doesn't have to be unidirectional.

In the downloadable document paradigm of knowledge work, the artifacts that you send are passive for the consumer.

You're going to choose the order, the format, what's included.

A site, on the other hand, opens up all sorts of different interactive possibilities.

This also, by the way, makes it easier for a single artifact to serve very different types of audiences.