Hah! I came to the same conclusion. PDF isn't actually that bad of a format and it's much easier and faster to parse and render than HTML/CSS. My conclusion:

Hah! I came to the same conclusion. PDF isn't actually that bad of a format and it's much easier and faster to parse and render than HTML/CSS. My conclusion: - Use the streaming format with the index headers at the start - Break the document into pages to aid rendering speed while jumping around but use zero margins on top/bottom to hide the fact that they are separate pages - Do the layout at publish time for a few screen widths — No need to reflow perfectly for every possible width We can get started with this and then maybe later tweak the PDF format — A text format with a binary format with a text format within a binary format kinda sucks. Should be completely binary. Maybe use an existing serialization format like protobufs.