HTML and PDF Documents: A Study in Terms of Genre Theory

The purpose of this thesis was to determine, in light of current genre theory, if Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) documents and Portable Document Format (PDF) documents are representative of separate and distinct genres. I chose a set of NASA documents, some published in HTML only, some published in PDF only, and one published in both HTML and PDF, as the focus of this study.

Using current genre theory and layout and design recommendations for print and HTML documents, I determined that HTML and PDF documents are not examples of distinct genres based on the NASA documents.