I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch [1], where we're working on fixing procurement in the space industry. We're constantly battling shitty datasheets.
As a space engineer, I found it infinitely frustrating to work with flyers that suppliers provide on their website, that also double-up as preliminary datasheets. They're messy, inconsistent, and subject to whatever the supplier thinks their buyer might want to know.
We wrote a blog article about the mess that exists in the space industry [2], and a follow-up about what we think can be done to improve this through Electronic Data Sheets (EDS) [3].
The EEE industry seems streets ahead in this regard, which is perhaps primarily down to strong commercialization and rapid growth of the market over the past 20 years. I think with companies like Octopart [4] making it patently obvious who does a good job of supporting engineers, it might also have pushed suppliers to improve their documentation.
I'm curious though about the consistent use of PDFs. I understand from a usability point of view that they're great for documents, but I would have imagined that the EEE industry would have started distributing "smart documents".
To give you an example, the AD datasheet in this article includes a number of high-res graphs: why has the sector not moved to the point where these graphs are interactive elements that you can zoom into, programmatically read off of, export data from, etc.? The way I look at it, a Juypter notebook or something similar would be an awesome way to share datasheet content, allowing much more interactivity.
Anyone with any thoughts as to why datasheets haven't progressed in that direction?
[2] https://blog.satsearch.co/2018-02-21-building-better-datashe...
[3] https://blog.satsearch.co/2018-01-23-the-challenges-of-an-en...