The guy outlines his whole case based on those exact points which are, as you have observed, technical quibbles and not a basis for abandoning HTML.
Under the hood it seems apparent to me that the real premise is an emotional one, not a technical one.
The internet is plastic not because of HTML, but because of money and people. When you have teens driving content it's going to feel plastic. When Walmart uses the internet to sell you crap it's gonna be plastic. Gossip / social platforms are trash, no matter the medium.
It could be argued that TV is an incredible learning platform ruined by HD. Back in the standard definition days we had proper news, documentaries that were substantial, and no reality TV. We need to go back to black and white standard definition.
Sorry, but the PDF web is not a solution to societal rot.
> The guy outlines his whole case based on those exact points which are, as you have observed, technical quibbles and not a basis for abandoning HTML.
He's actually more of a social observation: it doesn't matter what the technology can do, what matters how how the developers of that technology actually use it.
People who use PDF almost never use 3D graphics and heavy dynamic JS, so PDFs almost always have many of the qualities he's seeking.
Web developers almost never inline anything, and do all kinds of things that are arguably deal-breakers except for a few lowest-common-denominator use cases.
> Under the hood it seems apparent to me that the real premise is an emotional one, not a technical one.
The premise is that the web has failed in important and clear ways, it's impossible to fix so we should give up, so many use cases should abandon it for something else, and PDFs are unexpectedly well suited for that.
On a related note, part of me wishes Java Applets never died. Getting rid of them seems to have caused the Web to turn into them, and maybe if they'd remained some kind of separation could have been maintained.
Turning PDFs into the replacement for HTML would change the incentives around PDF authoring, and PDFs would then acquire the same problems identified with HTML.
The solution to the identified problems is not to switch to PDFs. Stop reshuffling the chairs on the deck of your sinking ship, and start figuring out how to design, implement, and incentivize the use of, some means of conveyance other than iceberg-vulnerable ships.
> On a related note, part of me wishes Java Applets never died. Getting rid of them seems to have caused the Web to turn into them, and maybe if they'd remained some kind of separation could have been maintained.
Not so surprising, really: the PDF standard evolved in parallel with Adobe's Flash between 2005 and 2010, which was then the key technology in Adobe's effort to keep a strategic toehold on the web. If Flash had not been a security clusterfuck, it might still be around. The PDF standard was always meant to be a complementary standard, and Adobe's attempted successor technologies have followed an even closer technological path.
The PDF standard has benefited from the fact that, unlike the W3C and WHATWG, surveillance capitalists have not been in the driving seat of its standardisation effort. Adobe's interests are not identical to those of the public, but they are not as essentially adversarial to them as the web standards bodies have been.
I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make here, but I don't think two different formats for encoding formatted text with images constitute different "mediums".
Of course they are, and we run into it constantly in computing. You can encode text with images as a bitmap, as vector graphics, as symbolic content that references bitmaps or vectors, as an algorithm that procedurally generates any of the above...
While you can produce identical outputs from the different methods, it's not hair-splitting to say that the authoring process and hence the nature of the medium to shape expression is affected by choosing one. When you opt towards maximizing generality your production cycle can grow without bound because everything is possible by layering different media, even if all of it is unnecessary. That's how you end up with creative projects that take multiple years to decades to accomplish.
Well, you seem to get the gist of the hot take the author put out. This article is not about PDFs. There is something wrong with the world and we can sense it.
This is close to it:
When you have teens driving content it's going to feel plastic.
Youth is the ultimate quality destroyer. They just fucking suck. I’m quite sick of their drivel honestly, and yet, we let them dictate the world (watch my childish cartoons, even in old age).
And the little shits complicate code bases. All you little rascals under 30, scram, I’m on to you.
And all you little adults acting like children, with your stupid motivational posts on LinkedIn, and your garbage bragging on there, I see you too.
Unless I'm on a paper-sized tablet I would definitely rather have an offline HTML file than a PDF. Nobody likes to pan back and forth on lines of text to read something.
I had the exact opposite reaction. I’m reading this on an iPhone SE2020, and I MUCH appreciate reading this in pdf form. I didn’t have to pan back and forth or even put the phone in landscape orientation. This is one of the smallest smartphones you can still buy, and the experience of PDF is WAY better than the user-hostile auto-flow text forced down mobile users’ throats.
I was skeptical at first, but I think the author made the point fantastically well.
Your browser has a zoom functionality that lets you make the text smaller, essentially replicating the PDF site above. Only the opposite of what you say is correct: I can’t read that PDF’s text without turning my phone into landscape and picking up my glasses.
To get equally small text on my desktop I have to turn the font size all the way down to 7. God forbid you have readers with less than stellar eyesight.
I get what they're going for but the PDF is not exactly an accessible reading experience.
I’m commenting here as a user reading a PDF. The fact that someone else could have laid it out differently doesn’t change the fixed layout of the PDF that I’m trying to read.
There’s a reason responsive design has been a big deal for the last 10+ years and I don’t think the benefits of PDF are worth throwing it out.
> These all seem like technical quibbles that miss the point.
If these all "miss the point", what is the point?
It seems to me that the article's point is that PDF as a format has attributes that satisfy the author's goal, whereas HTML does not. The parent comment says that HTML does have those attributes after all (if you choose to use HTML that way). That is very directly addressing the article's point, as I understand it.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but I believe the author's point was to highlight what a steaming mess the modern web is. The PDF aspect strikes me as illustrating a point, not a seriously proposed solution.
