5 ms·

What a glorious format for storing mankind's knowledge. Consider that by now displays have arbitrary sizes and a variety of proportions, and that papers are oft

by aasasd 7y ago

What a glorious format for storing mankind's knowledge. Consider that by now displays have arbitrary sizes and a variety of proportions, and that papers are often never printed but only read from screens. To reflow text for different screen sizes, you need its ‘semantic’ structure. And meanwhile if you say on HN that HTML should be used instead of PDF for papers, people will jump on you insisting that they need PDF for precise formatting of their papers—which mostly barely differ from Markdown by having two columns and formulas. What exactly they need ‘precise formatting’ for, and why it can't be solved with MathML and image fallback, they can't say. People feeling the urge to defend PDF might want to pick up at this point in the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21454636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21454636

fermienrico 7y ago
Actually, no thanks. "Sementic" structure is how we got responsive web soup of ugly websites with hamburger menus. We need the opposite, we need a format that stays the same size, same proportions and is vectorized so you can zoom to any size - however, the relationship of space between elements remains constant. PDF is an amazing format IMO. Think of it like Docker - the designer knows exactly how its going to appear on the user's device.
- nradov 7y ago
  The problems you describe have nothing to do with the semantic web. Those are orthogonal issues.
  - machinelabo 7y ago
    No, not everything is orthogonal. When you have sementic structure, you're gonna display it in responsive and adaptive way. That __breaks__ the design intent. For a designer, WYSIWYG is godsent. the parent comment is right - PDF is like a Docker container for designers - people who work with media. If you have opposing thoughts, please elaborate further instead of simply saying "nothing to do with it". HN works by explaining and arguing about issues to get to the bottom of something.
    - aasasd 7y ago
      > For a designer, WYSIWYG is godsent. the parent comment is right - PDF is like a Docker container for designers - people who work with media. Sorta like this then, more rigidly conveying the designer's intended layout: https://bureau.rocks/projects/book-typography-en/ https://bureau.rocks/projects/book-typography-en/ ? (Though these ‘books’ are almost the opposite of what I'm advocating for, in terms of formatting.)
- aasasd 7y ago
  So you're saying that if you have HTML as a tool then you're irresistibly drawn to making a complex page with menus and ugliness? I don't think that's a problem in HTML. I think the problem is in your head. > we need a format that stays the same size, same proportions Please explain how this helps people read a paper on screens of different sizes and proportions. Like me on my phone.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. We've had to ask you this before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - aasasd 7y ago
      It's pretty obviously not a personal attack.
      - dang 7y ago
        I read "I think the problem is in your head" as talking about the other user personally. Looking more closely, I can read it as a general statement, in which case it wasn't a personal attack. Statements of the form "So you're saying [obviously stupid thing]?" still break the site guidelines, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        aasasd 7y ago
        Well, firstly I don't need to place words in fermienrico's mouth, since the comment to which I was replying says: ‘"Sementic" structure is how we got responsive web soup of ugly websites with hamburger menus’. On my part I'm trying to figure out why fermienrico considers that connection to be inevitable, in the context of HTML production, as compared to PDF production—i.e. with my correspondent taking the place of an author. Next: > I don't think that's a problem in HTML. I think the problem is in your head. This directly addresses fermienrico's complaint as being targeted at HTML. The ‘in your head’ part says that the problem is imaginary and that the person's reasoning and motivation in arriving at that connection is a mystery to me. So there are two meanings combined, both of which aren't ad hominems. The statement also deliberately invokes the words of the character of Preobrazhensky from Bulgakov's ‘Heart of a Dog’, on the condition of the fresh-born Soviet Union: “The Disruption isn't in the lavatories, it's in the heads”. Let's inspect the statement more closely. The use of the second-person ‘you’ in hypothetical constructs is ubiquitous in English, instead of a third-person ‘a man’ or ‘one’, e.g.: “When you try reading PDF on a phone, you experience unspeakable horror and loss of all hope”—this doesn't imply that the addressed correspondent is the one doing this, and in fact may be directed at multiple unknown readers or listeners. The hyperbole of ‘you're nuts’ is, to my knowledge, also a typical feature of colloquial English language, e.g.: “You must be crazy to try reading PDF on a phone”, or “What's wrong with you, that tablet is too small to display PDF adequately”. These both don't mean that the correspondent is literally mentally damaged, but that the speaking party doesn't understand their reasoning or doesn't agree with it. My choice of words there is rather harsh, yes. Why I needed that is, I've had this same discussion before and I repeatedly failed to extract from people the reasons why they make this inference. I tried different approaches, and now came the time of directly placing the person in the shoes of an author. Still nothing so far. On top of all this and nitpicking further, even disregarding the above I still can't quite fit the statement in a ‘personal attack’ category: as I understand it, an ‘ad hominem’ works by carrying a belief ‘the person has some bad quality A’ over to ‘the person's opinion B hence must be wrong’. In the case of ‘you must be insane/naive to have the opinion B’ no other personal qualities are involved, and the opinion B is directly stated to be wrong. Possibly uncivil and possibly unsupported yes, personal no. P.S. Could someone please make the ‘collapse comments’ button-link larger on phones? It's even worse on a higher-PPI display, easily taking a dozen attempts to hit it—and extensions like Stylus aren't readily available on phones, what with Firefox dumping them in Preview. Just making the link a dozen characters wide would be splendid.
mLuby 7y ago
Not everything needs to look good on every screen size. I don't expect to be able to read academic papers on my smartwatch, and a simple alarm clock app looks kind of silly when it's fullscreen across a desktop monitor. Likewise, when layout makes the difference between reader understanding or confusion, it's hard to trust automatic reflowing on unknown screen sizes. PDF is simply better than HTML when it comes to preserving layout as the author intended.
- aasasd 7y ago
  I wonder if you realize that both your points wildly miss what I said. First, there's no need to stretch my argument to the point of it being ridiculous. I don't have to reach for a watch to suffer from PDF. Even a tablet is enough: I don't see many 14" tablets flying off the shelves. I also know for sure that the vast majority of ubiquitous communicator devices, aka smartphones, are about the same size as mine, so everyone with those is guaranteed to have the same shitty experience with papers on their communicators and will have to sedentary-lifestyle their ass off in front of a big display for barely any reason. Secondly: > Likewise, when layout makes the difference between reader understanding or confusion, it's hard to trust automatic reflowing on unknown screen sizes. PDF is simply better than HTML when it comes to preserving layout as the author intended. As I wrote right there above, still no explanation of why the layout makes that difference and why preserving it is so important when most papers are just walls of text + images + some formulas. Somehow I'm able to read those very things off HTML pages just fine.
  - 72deluxe 7y ago
    Some people are very "funny" about the layout of items and text and want it to be preserved identically to their "vision" when they created it. For example, every "marketing" individual when they see a webpage seem to want it pixel-perfect. I think it's the artist in them. This is understandable in some instances: a. Picasso's or Monet's works probably wouldn't be as good if you just roll them up into a ball. Sure, the component parts are still there (it's just paper/canvas and paint after all!) but the result isn't what they intended. b. A car that has hit a tree is made up of the composite parts but isn't quite as appealing (or useful) as the car before hitting the tree. c. A wedding cake doesn't look as good if the ingredients are just thrown over the wedding party's table. The ingredients are there, but it just isn't the same... Presentation is sometimes important.
alkonaut 7y ago
A PDF isn’t for storage it’s for display. It’s the equivalent of a printout. You don’t delete your CAD drawing or spreadsheet after printing it out.
- hnick 7y ago
  PDF/A is intended for archival and long term storage. They key difference is it contains no ambiguity (such as all fonts must be embedded).
- aasasd 7y ago
  > A PDF isn’t for storage it’s for display. It’s the equivalent of a printout. This conjecture would have some practical relevance if I had access to the same papers in other formats, preferably HTML. Yet I'm saddened time and again to find that I don't. In fact, producing HTML or PDF from the same source was exactly my proposed route before I was told that apparently Tex is only good for printing or PDFs. I hope that this is false, but not in a position to argue currently.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    But when you access a paper it’s for reading it, correct? It is worrying if places that are “libraries” of knowledge aren’t taking the opportunity to keep searchable/parseable data, but it’s no worse than a library of books.
    - aasasd 7y ago
      > but it’s no worse than a library of books That's not my complaint in the first place. The problem is that while we progressed beyond books on the device side in terms of even just the viewport, we seemingly can't move past the letter-sized paged format. The format may be a bit better than books—what with it being easily distributed and with occasionally copyable text—but not enough so. I'm not even touching the topic of info extraction here, since it's pretty hard on its own and despite it also being better with HTML.
      - 7y ago
lmm 7y ago
HTML has all the same problems and degrades over time. A PDF from 20 years ago will at least be readable by a human; a HTML page does not even guarantee that much. You're right that most of the relevant semantics would fit into Markdown. So store the markdown! There are problems with PDF but HTML is the worst of all worlds.
- aasasd 7y ago
  What exactly degrades about HTML in twenty years? I can read pages from the 90s just fine: the main thing off is the font size due to the change in screen resolutions, but—surprise!—plain HTML scales and reflows beautifully on big and small screens. (Which is the complete opposite of ‘HTML has the same problems’.) I hope you're not lamenting the loss of the ‘blink’ tag. If you're talking about images and whatnot falling off, that's a problem of delivery and not the format. Markdown translates to HTML one-to-one, it's in the basic features of Markdown. For some reason I have to repeat time and again: use a subset of HTML for papers, not ‘glamor magazine’ formatting. The use of HTML doesn't oblige you to go wild with its features.
  - lmm 7y ago
    > What exactly degrades about HTML in twenty years? I can read pages from the 90s just fine: the main thing off is the font size due to the change in screen resolutions, but—surprise!—plain HTML scales and reflows beautifully on big and small screens. (Which is the complete opposite of ‘HTML has the same problems’.) I hope you're not lamenting the loss of the ‘blink’ tag. I am indeed, and of other tags that are no longer supported. Old sites are often impossible to render with the correct layout. Resources refuse to load because of mixed-content policy or because they're simply gone - which is a problem with the format because the format is not built for providing the whole page as a single artifact. And while the oldest generation of sites embraced the reflowing of HTML, the CSS2-era sites did not, so it's not at all clear that they will be usable on different-resolution screens in the future. > Markdown translates to HTML one-to-one, it's in the basic features of Markdown. For some reason I have to repeat time and again: use a subset of HTML for papers, not ‘glamor magazine’ formatting. The use of HTML doesn't oblige you to go wild with its features. This is one of those things that sounds easy but is impossible in practice. Unless you can clearly define the line between which features should be used and which should not, you'll end up with all of the features of HTML being used, and all of the problems that result.

by aasasd 7y ago

fermienrico 7y ago

Actually, no thanks. "Sementic" structure is how we got responsive web soup of ugly websites with hamburger menus. We need the opposite, we need a format that stays the same size, same proportions and is vectorized so you can zoom to any size - however, the relationship of space between elements remains constant. PDF is an amazing format IMO. Think of it like Docker - the designer knows exactly how its going to appear on the user's device.

nradov 7y ago
The problems you describe have nothing to do with the semantic web. Those are orthogonal issues.
- machinelabo 7y ago
  No, not everything is orthogonal. When you have sementic structure, you're gonna display it in responsive and adaptive way. That __breaks__ the design intent. For a designer, WYSIWYG is godsent. the parent comment is right - PDF is like a Docker container for designers - people who work with media. If you have opposing thoughts, please elaborate further instead of simply saying "nothing to do with it". HN works by explaining and arguing about issues to get to the bottom of something.
  - aasasd 7y ago
    > For a designer, WYSIWYG is godsent. the parent comment is right - PDF is like a Docker container for designers - people who work with media. Sorta like this then, more rigidly conveying the designer's intended layout: https://bureau.rocks/projects/book-typography-en/ https://bureau.rocks/projects/book-typography-en/ ? (Though these ‘books’ are almost the opposite of what I'm advocating for, in terms of formatting.)
aasasd 7y ago
So you're saying that if you have HTML as a tool then you're irresistibly drawn to making a complex page with menus and ugliness? I don't think that's a problem in HTML. I think the problem is in your head. > we need a format that stays the same size, same proportions Please explain how this helps people read a paper on screens of different sizes and proportions. Like me on my phone.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. We've had to ask you this before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - aasasd 7y ago
    It's pretty obviously not a personal attack.
    - dang 7y ago
      I read "I think the problem is in your head" as talking about the other user personally. Looking more closely, I can read it as a general statement, in which case it wasn't a personal attack. Statements of the form "So you're saying [obviously stupid thing]?" still break the site guidelines, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - aasasd 7y ago
        Well, firstly I don't need to place words in fermienrico's mouth, since the comment to which I was replying says: ‘"Sementic" structure is how we got responsive web soup of ugly websites with hamburger menus’. On my part I'm trying to figure out why fermienrico considers that connection to be inevitable, in the context of HTML production, as compared to PDF production—i.e. with my correspondent taking the place of an author. Next: > I don't think that's a problem in HTML. I think the problem is in your head. This directly addresses fermienrico's complaint as being targeted at HTML. The ‘in your head’ part says that the problem is imaginary and that the person's reasoning and motivation in arriving at that connection is a mystery to me. So there are two meanings combined, both of which aren't ad hominems. The statement also deliberately invokes the words of the character of Preobrazhensky from Bulgakov's ‘Heart of a Dog’, on the condition of the fresh-born Soviet Union: “The Disruption isn't in the lavatories, it's in the heads”. Let's inspect the statement more closely. The use of the second-person ‘you’ in hypothetical constructs is ubiquitous in English, instead of a third-person ‘a man’ or ‘one’, e.g.: “When you try reading PDF on a phone, you experience unspeakable horror and loss of all hope”—this doesn't imply that the addressed correspondent is the one doing this, and in fact may be directed at multiple unknown readers or listeners. The hyperbole of ‘you're nuts’ is, to my knowledge, also a typical feature of colloquial English language, e.g.: “You must be crazy to try reading PDF on a phone”, or “What's wrong with you, that tablet is too small to display PDF adequately”. These both don't mean that the correspondent is literally mentally damaged, but that the speaking party doesn't understand their reasoning or doesn't agree with it. My choice of words there is rather harsh, yes. Why I needed that is, I've had this same discussion before and I repeatedly failed to extract from people the reasons why they make this inference. I tried different approaches, and now came the time of directly placing the person in the shoes of an author. Still nothing so far. On top of all this and nitpicking further, even disregarding the above I still can't quite fit the statement in a ‘personal attack’ category: as I understand it, an ‘ad hominem’ works by carrying a belief ‘the person has some bad quality A’ over to ‘the person's opinion B hence must be wrong’. In the case of ‘you must be insane/naive to have the opinion B’ no other personal qualities are involved, and the opinion B is directly stated to be wrong. Possibly uncivil and possibly unsupported yes, personal no. P.S. Could someone please make the ‘collapse comments’ button-link larger on phones? It's even worse on a higher-PPI display, easily taking a dozen attempts to hit it—and extensions like Stylus aren't readily available on phones, what with Firefox dumping them in Preview. Just making the link a dozen characters wide would be splendid.

mLuby 7y ago

Not everything needs to look good on every screen size. I don't expect to be able to read academic papers on my smartwatch, and a simple alarm clock app looks kind of silly when it's fullscreen across a desktop monitor. Likewise, when layout makes the difference between reader understanding or confusion, it's hard to trust automatic reflowing on unknown screen sizes. PDF is simply better than HTML when it comes to preserving layout as the author intended.

aasasd 7y ago
I wonder if you realize that both your points wildly miss what I said. First, there's no need to stretch my argument to the point of it being ridiculous. I don't have to reach for a watch to suffer from PDF. Even a tablet is enough: I don't see many 14" tablets flying off the shelves. I also know for sure that the vast majority of ubiquitous communicator devices, aka smartphones, are about the same size as mine, so everyone with those is guaranteed to have the same shitty experience with papers on their communicators and will have to sedentary-lifestyle their ass off in front of a big display for barely any reason. Secondly: > Likewise, when layout makes the difference between reader understanding or confusion, it's hard to trust automatic reflowing on unknown screen sizes. PDF is simply better than HTML when it comes to preserving layout as the author intended. As I wrote right there above, still no explanation of why the layout makes that difference and why preserving it is so important when most papers are just walls of text + images + some formulas. Somehow I'm able to read those very things off HTML pages just fine.
- 72deluxe 7y ago
  Some people are very "funny" about the layout of items and text and want it to be preserved identically to their "vision" when they created it. For example, every "marketing" individual when they see a webpage seem to want it pixel-perfect. I think it's the artist in them. This is understandable in some instances: a. Picasso's or Monet's works probably wouldn't be as good if you just roll them up into a ball. Sure, the component parts are still there (it's just paper/canvas and paint after all!) but the result isn't what they intended. b. A car that has hit a tree is made up of the composite parts but isn't quite as appealing (or useful) as the car before hitting the tree. c. A wedding cake doesn't look as good if the ingredients are just thrown over the wedding party's table. The ingredients are there, but it just isn't the same... Presentation is sometimes important.

alkonaut 7y ago

A PDF isn’t for storage it’s for display. It’s the equivalent of a printout. You don’t delete your CAD drawing or spreadsheet after printing it out.

hnick 7y ago
PDF/A is intended for archival and long term storage. They key difference is it contains no ambiguity (such as all fonts must be embedded).
aasasd 7y ago
> A PDF isn’t for storage it’s for display. It’s the equivalent of a printout. This conjecture would have some practical relevance if I had access to the same papers in other formats, preferably HTML. Yet I'm saddened time and again to find that I don't. In fact, producing HTML or PDF from the same source was exactly my proposed route before I was told that apparently Tex is only good for printing or PDFs. I hope that this is false, but not in a position to argue currently.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  But when you access a paper it’s for reading it, correct? It is worrying if places that are “libraries” of knowledge aren’t taking the opportunity to keep searchable/parseable data, but it’s no worse than a library of books.
  - aasasd 7y ago
    > but it’s no worse than a library of books That's not my complaint in the first place. The problem is that while we progressed beyond books on the device side in terms of even just the viewport, we seemingly can't move past the letter-sized paged format. The format may be a bit better than books—what with it being easily distributed and with occasionally copyable text—but not enough so. I'm not even touching the topic of info extraction here, since it's pretty hard on its own and despite it also being better with HTML.
    - 7y ago

lmm 7y ago

HTML has all the same problems and degrades over time. A PDF from 20 years ago will at least be readable by a human; a HTML page does not even guarantee that much. You're right that most of the relevant semantics would fit into Markdown. So store the markdown! There are problems with PDF but HTML is the worst of all worlds.

aasasd 7y ago
What exactly degrades about HTML in twenty years? I can read pages from the 90s just fine: the main thing off is the font size due to the change in screen resolutions, but—surprise!—plain HTML scales and reflows beautifully on big and small screens. (Which is the complete opposite of ‘HTML has the same problems’.) I hope you're not lamenting the loss of the ‘blink’ tag. If you're talking about images and whatnot falling off, that's a problem of delivery and not the format. Markdown translates to HTML one-to-one, it's in the basic features of Markdown. For some reason I have to repeat time and again: use a subset of HTML for papers, not ‘glamor magazine’ formatting. The use of HTML doesn't oblige you to go wild with its features.
- lmm 7y ago
  > What exactly degrades about HTML in twenty years? I can read pages from the 90s just fine: the main thing off is the font size due to the change in screen resolutions, but—surprise!—plain HTML scales and reflows beautifully on big and small screens. (Which is the complete opposite of ‘HTML has the same problems’.) I hope you're not lamenting the loss of the ‘blink’ tag. I am indeed, and of other tags that are no longer supported. Old sites are often impossible to render with the correct layout. Resources refuse to load because of mixed-content policy or because they're simply gone - which is a problem with the format because the format is not built for providing the whole page as a single artifact. And while the oldest generation of sites embraced the reflowing of HTML, the CSS2-era sites did not, so it's not at all clear that they will be usable on different-resolution screens in the future. > Markdown translates to HTML one-to-one, it's in the basic features of Markdown. For some reason I have to repeat time and again: use a subset of HTML for papers, not ‘glamor magazine’ formatting. The use of HTML doesn't oblige you to go wild with its features. This is one of those things that sounds easy but is impossible in practice. Unless you can clearly define the line between which features should be used and which should not, you'll end up with all of the features of HTML being used, and all of the problems that result.