How is formatting important though? Semantic formatting, sure, but again, a 20-year-old HTML file still has that preserved. The em-perfect formatting inherent i

How is formatting important though? Semantic formatting, sure, but again, a 20-year-old HTML file still has that preserved. The em-perfect formatting inherent in PDF seems entirely purposeless unless you for some reason need to be able to reproduce a printed copy of the document exactly. Formulas are a special case, but the great majority of documents I see distributed in PDF would be more useful as HTML, and I don't buy the argument that it would risk archivability. At the end of the day, HTML is a plain-text format which is quite human-readable even if all the world's HTML renderers were somehow lost to the ages. The only use-case I can conceive for perfectly-reproducable layout if you are not a print publisher is in fields where it is convention to reference text by page+paragraph number; in those cases, the page number is actually semantic information so could quite trivially be encoded in the content of the document to maintain that referent. > Search works fine in PDF. Search works fine in PDFs that don't use hyphenation or which properly implement it, and when they don't it breaks silently in ways that are potentially disastrous. > Mobile is not optimal, but platforms optimized for mobile require different design considerations. And my point about mobile was you don't need to optimize for it. >Few webpages look or function identically on mobile. Again, it doesn't need to look identical. That is a falce requirement. There is no value in that. The only web pages that don't function on mobile are ones which have been optimized for desktop. We're not talking about general-purpose web pages here, we're talking about textual documents. This is not some hypothetical scenario, BTW. The UK has been using HTML over PDF for public-facing documents for a couple years now, it seems to be working out for them[1]. 1. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should-be-published-in-html-and-not-pdf/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should...