5 ms·

Honestly, that's just silly. If they'd use html instead of pdf, you'd still have the same content. pdf is a format. It has nothing to do with the content.

a-priori 6y ago
The constraints and expectations of the medium strongly influence the content. If I had an idea and wanted to communicate it, then I did so by recorded video, by live video, by blog post, by Twitter thread, and by HN comment, the same idea would be presented in very different ways. In the same way, a writer who publishes something by HTML (blog post, etc.) will produce a very different document than if they intend to publish it by PDF (ebook, etc.). They tailor their message to the constraint and expectations of the medium.
znpy 6y ago
If we used html instead of pdf the whole society would collapse. Didn't anyone notice that it's basically impossible to save an html page today and have it load and render correctly and offline tomorrow?
- kevincox 6y ago
  Perfect fidelity isn't there but all popular browsers have a "save page" functionality which seems to work really well.
  - spear 6y ago
    I've found the best way to save a page on a browser is to print it ... to PDF.
    - stOneskull 6y ago
      it's quite nice this way. much better than the old .mht file even. it skips the junk.
    - _Microft 6y ago
      Absolutely, depending on how much I care about the content, I either print it directly from the reader mode (which gives pretty bland results) or I touch up the page itself with things like "column-count: 2" and a few changes to headlines, to give it the look of a proper print article. Either way, printing to PDFs is a great way to archive/save web content for later.
    - znpy 6y ago
      This is brilliant... I hadn't thought about it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - oconnor663 6y ago
    That's exactly what the parent is criticizing. The problem with save page is that the HTML you save still contains tons of links to server resources, particularly CSS and JS. Of course those links will work if you look at the saved page immediately after you save it. The problem is that if you come back later, sometimes even just the next day, they no longer work. A lot of JS file names are auto-generated random numbers, produced by packaging systems rather than humans, which change whenever the developers edit their JS. They aren't designed to be stable. There are tools that try to fetch those links and update the HTML to point to the local copy. But those tools can only go so far. JS is allowed to fetch new files dynamically, and there's no reliable way to look at a piece of code and automatically figure out what it's going to fetch when you run it.
    - kindofastrawman 6y ago
      > JS is allowed to fetch new files dynamically, and there's no reliable way to look at a piece of code and automatically figure out what it's going to fetch when you run it. You've diverged from the context and are no longer doing an apples-to-apples comparison. The things you're describing are all opt-in and amount to having to deal with an adversarial input. There's nothing inherent to the medium that requires those things. In other words, a person publishing a PDF is already abstaining from certain things. (Namely, the sorts of things you're bringing up that would make for a pathological case.) If the person who publishes a PDF does a straightforward translation into a web page, then you end up with something that doesn't exhibit any of the downsides you're discussing.
      - oconnor663 6y ago
        Good point, and also relevant user name :)
      - anoncake 6y ago
        No, but the medium allows these things. And that's a problem.
    - kevincox 6y ago
      No, most browsers will save the resources as well and rewrite the HTML to reference them. You can have problems with dynamically loaded things but I have found that it works very well in practice. I have had maybe one page that was significantly broken saving from Firefox over the years.
- j88439h84 6y ago
  SingleFile can do it.
- Tade0 6y ago
  I've put together a small tool that, using *.har files, by accident also does this[0], but it only works for simple sites like Wikipedia. [0] https://github.com/Tade0/emergency-poncho https://github.com/Tade0/emergency-poncho
  - enriquto 6y ago
    It's funny that you mention wikipedia, since one of my favorite wikipedia features is the "download as PDF" link, by which you can obtain any article in a beautiful and readable form.
- ljcn 6y ago
  Not all html pages - what about hackernews? It's mostly tables with minimal CSS (a bit of padding and font*/color), I bet it continues to be perfectly rendered practically indefinitely. At least snapshots on archive.org from 2007 still look perfect.
formerly_proven 6y ago
In Gov't or consulting reports the content tends to start somewhere around page 20-30.

a-priori 6y ago

The constraints and expectations of the medium strongly influence the content. If I had an idea and wanted to communicate it, then I did so by recorded video, by live video, by blog post, by Twitter thread, and by HN comment, the same idea would be presented in very different ways. In the same way, a writer who publishes something by HTML (blog post, etc.) will produce a very different document than if they intend to publish it by PDF (ebook, etc.). They tailor their message to the constraint and expectations of the medium.

znpy 6y ago

If we used html instead of pdf the whole society would collapse. Didn't anyone notice that it's basically impossible to save an html page today and have it load and render correctly and offline tomorrow?

kevincox 6y ago
Perfect fidelity isn't there but all popular browsers have a "save page" functionality which seems to work really well.
- spear 6y ago
  I've found the best way to save a page on a browser is to print it ... to PDF.
  - stOneskull 6y ago
    it's quite nice this way. much better than the old .mht file even. it skips the junk.
  - _Microft 6y ago
    Absolutely, depending on how much I care about the content, I either print it directly from the reader mode (which gives pretty bland results) or I touch up the page itself with things like "column-count: 2" and a few changes to headlines, to give it the look of a proper print article. Either way, printing to PDFs is a great way to archive/save web content for later.
  - znpy 6y ago
    This is brilliant... I hadn't thought about it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- oconnor663 6y ago
  That's exactly what the parent is criticizing. The problem with save page is that the HTML you save still contains tons of links to server resources, particularly CSS and JS. Of course those links will work if you look at the saved page immediately after you save it. The problem is that if you come back later, sometimes even just the next day, they no longer work. A lot of JS file names are auto-generated random numbers, produced by packaging systems rather than humans, which change whenever the developers edit their JS. They aren't designed to be stable. There are tools that try to fetch those links and update the HTML to point to the local copy. But those tools can only go so far. JS is allowed to fetch new files dynamically, and there's no reliable way to look at a piece of code and automatically figure out what it's going to fetch when you run it.
  - kindofastrawman 6y ago
    > JS is allowed to fetch new files dynamically, and there's no reliable way to look at a piece of code and automatically figure out what it's going to fetch when you run it. You've diverged from the context and are no longer doing an apples-to-apples comparison. The things you're describing are all opt-in and amount to having to deal with an adversarial input. There's nothing inherent to the medium that requires those things. In other words, a person publishing a PDF is already abstaining from certain things. (Namely, the sorts of things you're bringing up that would make for a pathological case.) If the person who publishes a PDF does a straightforward translation into a web page, then you end up with something that doesn't exhibit any of the downsides you're discussing.
    - oconnor663 6y ago
      Good point, and also relevant user name :)
    - anoncake 6y ago
      No, but the medium allows these things. And that's a problem.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    No, most browsers will save the resources as well and rewrite the HTML to reference them. You can have problems with dynamically loaded things but I have found that it works very well in practice. I have had maybe one page that was significantly broken saving from Firefox over the years.
j88439h84 6y ago
SingleFile can do it.
Tade0 6y ago
I've put together a small tool that, using *.har files, by accident also does this[0], but it only works for simple sites like Wikipedia. [0] https://github.com/Tade0/emergency-poncho https://github.com/Tade0/emergency-poncho
- enriquto 6y ago
  It's funny that you mention wikipedia, since one of my favorite wikipedia features is the "download as PDF" link, by which you can obtain any article in a beautiful and readable form.
ljcn 6y ago
Not all html pages - what about hackernews? It's mostly tables with minimal CSS (a bit of padding and font*/color), I bet it continues to be perfectly rendered practically indefinitely. At least snapshots on archive.org from 2007 still look perfect.

formerly_proven 6y ago

In Gov't or consulting reports the content tends to start somewhere around page 20-30.