Let's not forget that the reference PDF reader, Adobe Acrobat, has turned into a pile of shit about 15-20 years ago, with "plugins" and stuff making its load ti

Let's not forget that the reference PDF reader, Adobe Acrobat, has turned into a pile of shit about 15-20 years ago, with "plugins" and stuff making its load time surpass that of browsers at the time, and severe security issues going unfixed, that PDFs frequently use text in non-semantic text order or even as stored bitmaps, with the deficiencies in searching and linking within PDFs that goes with it. Also, Adobe found it necessary to include JavaScript execution from PDF, and also dysfunctional PDF forms/signing and interactivity features such as linking which more often than not pose a problem rather than solution on the rare occasions where I've encountered their use. AFAICS, valid (?) use cases for PDFs (apart from sending out a document to a print shop) include e-books (incl fingerprints), academical publishing, user manuals, formal business and legal statements, and personal archival (PDF/A with prerendered layout and embedded fonts). Even as a critic of CSS complexity, I believe all these use cases except academic publishing should use markup+CSS instead, and if there are deficiencies in browsers, they can and should be addressed and fixed. I find it particularly painful that .mht, .warc, or other HTML-based archival format hasn't gained trust (and probably won't work well with today's JavaScript-heavy sites, many of which don't have a reason to use JavaScript except for lock-in, analytics, and plain incompetence).