All the journals in my field (oceanography) show papers as HTML, with a link to get the PDF. I go for that link if a three-second glance makes me think the pap

All the journals in my field (oceanography) show papers as HTML, with a link to get the PDF. I go for that link if a three-second glance makes me think the paper might be of interest. I am certainly not alone in this; I have never heard anyone state a preference for the HTML view. This is not just for one journal; it's for the dozen or so journals that I look at regularly. The mathematics looks terrible in HTML, and great in PDF. Figures usually look terrible in HTML, and quite often when you click on the action to zoom them, you get a choice of just one zoom factor. Plus, the caption disappears so it's easy to get lost. With PDF, you can select your zoom factor and maintain context. PDF has fixed page numbers, so you can refer to material in the paper easily. The fixedness of PDF aids memory. I can look at a paper I've not consulted in 30 years, and know that something I want is (say) at the top of the right-hand column just past the figure showing such-and-such. With HTML, I basically get lost in a stream that changes if I zoom the text (often required to try to decode poorly formatted mathematical symbols) or even change the geometry of my viewing window. I can highlight PDFs, and add comments to them. This is enormously valuable in research work. (La)tex-generated PDF files can offer mathematical representations that are not just clear, but elegant, and in a form that matches historical convention. HTML representations vary from journal to journal (which is bad enough in and of itself) and almost never match what the reader expects from standard textbooks and classic papers. I suppose HTML has the benefit that it can be set up to adjust to the viewing platform, so I can try to read a paper on my mobile phone. Not that doing so makes any sense at all. For me, it's an easy decision.