Well here are some reasons why .pdfs are better: 1. They are a flat format. Why is this good? When you text search for something it can be found, vs. in HTML

Well here are some reasons why .pdfs are better: 1. They are a flat format. Why is this good? When you text search for something it can be found, vs. in HTML where you can search only a single web page instead of a hypertext graph- I mean what would a complete search even mean in HTML? 2. They are also hierarchical. I can print a hierarchical schematic and navigate through it by clicking on sheet-blocks. 3. You can view 3d renderings in them. Someone can save their solidworks document as a .pdf, and I can open it and zoom and rotate the view in acrobat reader. There is certainly no standard way to do this in HTML. 4. There are no ads. 5. I can send somebody the complete thing as a single file. For a web-site I would have to send them a zip file that they then would have to extract- it's just not as nice somehow, though in theory it should be OK. This shows up in microcontroller documentation for example. Usually the chip TRM is a 1000 page pdf, but the software is a bunch of HTML files (a web-site really). It's inevitably easier to get the chip TRM than it is the software documentation. Actually in this particular case there is more- the software documentation is generated as extracted comments from source code by doxygen and it is usually crap. Pdf documentation someone actually wrote, so it tends to be better. When you get HTML documentation, there is often not an index.html file. If there isn't one, which document do you open first? 6. Every documentation as a web-site system has their own navigation method, whereas .pdfs have acrobat reader or whatever. Even on web documentation that has something like a go to next page or section button, it's hit or miss if it works well. For example, the placement of the next button will vary from page to page, so you can't easily just page through it.