This saves organizations time and money and ultimately gains more loyal customers by providing more immediate and accurate product data. Just Won't Share A key element to e-commerce is sharing information between business partners. Content is the actual data and data format. The user interface is the application required to view the content. Examples include Oracle, IBM or Microsoft database, Excel, Word or other text editor, Netscape or Microsoft Explorer browser.
Functionality is the toolset or features the viewer applies to the content.
Examples include catalog server, catalog management, catalog syndication, application server and database server. PDF combines all three components into a single definition or file. Because PDF files require the Reader or Distiller, Adobe Acrobat defines the content, user interface and functionality. Consequently, the whole files can only be shared among systems based upon Acrobat, which is severely limiting. The ideal solution separates these components so that content can be isolated and viewed by many different applications.