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Deurbanising the Web [pdf]

• justanotherguy0 5y ago
  Not optimized for mobile so I didn't read much and bounced.
  • PretzelPirate 5y ago
    I read it on my phone. I then clicked an external link at the end and then hit my browser back button. I had to wait for the PDF to re-load and was unhappy when I found myself back at the top of the document. I would get a much better experience with html.
• the_other 5y ago
  If you don’t want churn, don’t churn. PDF is not a web format and you’re wasting effort trying to shoehorn print content and a print format for display on the web. Just use HTML and don’t update it, it’s probably easier.
  • silon42 5y ago
    EPUB?
    • jacobmischka 5y ago
      Which is just basic HTML and CSS itself.
      • guywhocodes 5y ago
        Yeah but it's a decent subset. Most of the complaints of the author should be significantly better
        • jacobmischka 5y ago
          It would be better if they just used that subset and just published it directly instead of needlessly repackaging it, but if that's what was meant then sure. Maybe we need a better name for simple, semantic HTML and basic CSS.
          • Finnucane 5y ago
            The point of it is to be a self-contained package. You still need hardware to read it, but not a server. In theory at least, once you have it, it's yours. (of course the commerical ebook vendors are trying to spoil that.)
        • goodpoint 5y ago
          No, it still supports plenty of trackers/spyware and so on.
    • mojuba 5y ago
      EPUB is an under-appreciated format that I think can serve as a short to mid-term storage for human knowledge. Can reasonably re-flow itself when necessary, no language run-time required, just a full Unicode support at least at the level of the time the file was published. That's the Internet of knowledge I'd love to see: things organized in EPUB's, searchable and downloadable.
  • massysett 5y ago
    It's pretty amazing that the basic HTML that I learned 20 years ago still works - it even displays fine on devices like tablets and phones that did not even exist 20 years ago. I understand the author's sentiment but PDF is an overreaction. Just write static boring HTML.
    • cxr 5y ago
      Indeed, there's a lot of irony packed into the first page: Featured is a quote from LWN indicting the "software industry" and its "brittle dependencies". What's ironic about this? It's squarely about the parts of the software industry that deal in things that are _not_ meant to be painted in the browser. If you want a solution to the (perceived) churn, it's funnily enough right in the quote from Mark Pilgrim: "I've migrated to HTML 4". HTML is almost certainly not going to end up drifting in such a way that DJB's qhasm bibliography page[1] is ever going to break. HTML and the Web standards in general are, with extremely rare exceptions, cumulative. It's pretty frightening how many technical people don't understand this; the Web is intentionally engineered to serve as "the infrastructure for handling humanity's publishing needs indefinitely"[2]. More frightening is that the biggest threat to this are people like the author here who treat the Web as if it's like any other thing that the computing industry puts out—i.e., already perennially broken. This is dangerous because it anachronistically cedes power to folks who'd try to argue at some point in the future that the things about the Web that they'd like to break (and might be in a position to break e.g. due to browser monopoly) are justified and no big deal, really. The author goes on to call out the Web ("of rubbish") as "user-hostile". Shortly afterward, he or she writes that "PDF makes a stand against the churn". More accurately, PDF makes a stand against the user, by prioritizing authors' creative whims over the reader's needs. This happens again later in their remarks about PDFs being page-oriented: "you are fundamentally not in control of the reading experience." The "you" here is not you, the actual reader. The control they refer to is, once again, the author's. You get other poor arguments—that PDFs are "offlineable" "files" that can be distributed "decentralized", none of which are accurate criticisms against what HTML lacks—unless those Java documentation zipballs that seemingly every university student enrolled in a CS program in the early 2000s was made to download are a collective hallucination. And it gets worse from there. Cute stunt to grab attention and all, but the arguments are fundamentally bankrupt. 1. http://cr.yp.to/qhasm/literature.html http://cr.yp.to/qhasm/literature.html 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27368632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27368632
  • austincheney 5y ago
    That’s a hard sell. The churn exists because people want it, not end users, but people who are paid to produce websites. Most churn comes in two flavors: * analytics and spyware * convenience code for insecure developers
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    It's not a browser format (though browsers can render it), but that isn't the same not being a web format. The web is just the ability to retrieve files from other people's servers, that may themselves reference other files on yet other people's servers. As long as a file format supports hyperlinks, then it's suitable for the web. If you don't care about being able to actually click the hyperlink to activate your desktop system's uri schema handler, then even plain text works fine.
• 0xcoffee 5y ago
  Excellent! Excited to see the next PDF generator framework.
• greatgib 5y ago
  What is the summary? Same as someone else, to read on mobile I have to download and open a pdf so i just cancelled the download and ignored the link
  • prox 5y ago
    What is the bump you experience that you don’t want to download and open a pdf? Here it opens in my browser directly (Safari)
    • kzrdude 5y ago
      It ends up in the downloads folder and needs cleanup later.
      • codetrotter 5y ago
        In all browsers that I use that is only true if the server sends a Content-Disposition header with its value set to “attachment” (optionally with a file name), or maybe also in the case where the server specifies incorrect or unspecific Content-Type (such as simply “application/octet-stream” instead of “application/pdf”).
        • kzrdude 5y ago
          What I said happens for Firefox on android, unfortunately. It's a great browser, of course.
        • sharken 5y ago
          On the Brave browser for Android it also downloads the PDF file and stores it locally. Websites should use HTML and not PDF in my opinion. On top of that the end result is not very readable on mobile, the font is too small.
          • codetrotter 5y ago
            > [...] Websites should use HTML and not PDF in my opinion. > On top of that the end result is not very readable on mobile, the font is too small. Agreed on both counts. Was only commenting about browsers saving PDFs. PDF is not a comfortable format for reading on a screen. Nor a comfortable format to extract text or data from.
• kissgyorgy 5y ago
  It's a terrible "implementation", but interesting observations we should consider.
• prox 5y ago
  I love the basic idea here. Needs polishing if you want to blow this up to the masses. It’s like my Pi who just does one thing really well, and allows me to tinker on every level if I so choose.
  • prox 5y ago
    I like to add that I think a well designed PDF is just so much better looking than any html based page (and has a lot more freedom)
    • pasc1878 5y ago
      Definitely less freedom. On html I the reader can change the size of text or even the font and the text will reflow so you don't need scroll horizontally to read each line. How do you do that to a pdf?
      • prox 5y ago
        That’s not what I mean (your point has merit) If I ask a designer to design a website, he has to send it of for implementation, or is confined by html breakpoint/accessibility options. PDF can go straight from designer to document and do everything in a program like designer, indesign and so on. It’s a designer first paradigm.
• MichalSternik 5y ago
  Well, what's wrong with static site (generators)? I certainly get the argument, but using something like hugo or gatsby or jekyll when you want to avoid the "churn" also seems like a perfectly valid solution.
  • float4 5y ago
    The only thing I like about PDF compared to HTML is that with PDF, I know for a fact that no web requests are made in the background. That means no fingerprinting, no analytics etc. With HTML, I have to trust that some random entity does what they state in their privacy policy, and they regularly don't. Sure, I can disable JS, but then 95% of the web doesn't work anymore. Other than that PDF is quite clearly a less accessible format.
    • deregulateMed 5y ago
      You are fingerprinted when you find the web link.
      • float4 5y ago
        When I click a link you mean? Definitely true, but that way they only have access to my IP and user agent, which is still better than all the WebGL, Font library, display calibration settings, mouse movement etc. that they use otherwise. I often use Tor, although I'm pretty sure that even then, a good analytics lib can see it's me based on scroll behaviour, mouse movement, time of day, and of course what I browse. But yeah, you make a good point.
        • deregulateMed 5y ago
          Where do you get the link?
          • float4 5y ago
            DDG mostly, and they don't track users.
• LightG 5y ago
  Appreciated the sentiment of it. It's not ideal, but in a non-ideal world where the big boys have ruined the web, I tip my hat to this effort with a large dose of empathy. Cheers,
• JorgeGT 5y ago
  While this may be extreme, I do notice that it is becoming harder and harder to print webpages to PDF/paper. Is there a good approach for this besides the standard print dialog?
  • bigyikes 5y ago
    For sites without print-specific media queries (so basically all websites) I use dev tools to delete all the DOM nodes I don’t want to appear in print.
  • kuu 5y ago
    Maybe use the read mode of Firefox and then print it?
• throwawayswede 5y ago
  While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't think PDF is the way, at least in the way you're currently doing it. PDF maybe supported by browsers, but they're not intended for it, it's secondary feature. Same for search engines. Same for mobile. Most browsers have Print to PDF. If you want people to be able to download an immutable version of your content, then just have a simple static version of your page with a valid print css, better yet, leave everything default. If you want to fight churn with PDF, just have a simple HTML website with a link to download a versioned PDF of your issue. Your website can be as simple as https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ or https://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com https://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com.
  • grumblenum 5y ago
    There are also other lightweight alternatives. The Gopher protocol has a small, but disturbed following : http://gopher.muffinlabs.com/gopher.floodgap.com http://gopher.muffinlabs.com/gopher.floodgap.com (you can actually use netcat as your gopher client). Gemini is a more modern gopher-inspired protocol https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/. Personally, I'd be pleased to see a text-first approach gain adoption. I don't think anyone looks at the thick-client model browsers have evolved into and sees an optimal solution. I think evangelistic energy should probably be directed at complaining to organizations that share content through JS-framework monstrosities. Getting rank-and-file web-devs excited about lean websites doesn't hurt, but clients and CTOs have real decision making power.
• Aeolun 5y ago
  All of the stuff he says PDF is, is the same for HTML.
  • zeusk 5y ago
    Well, sort of. Can't HTML contain script tags with external references (xmlHttpRequest or any async fetch) that a simple crawler/browser may not save to disk?
    • wffurr 5y ago
      It can, but you don’t have to. It’s absolutely possible to write self contained html files.
    • wccrawford 5y ago
      They could, but if he's the one create the file, he can choose. And if he's just hosting the file, I'm sure there are tools that will inline all the external resources.
• vimy 5y ago
  Reading PDFs on a phone isn’t an enjoyable experience.
  • deregulateMed 5y ago
    For books, I prefer it to Libby and Google Books. There are tons of pdf viewers to choose from, so if you don't like an App, there are more available. I like that mine remembers the last opened doc and page. I can copy text from pdf too. Although this isn't a comparison of ebook to pdf, it's html to pdf.
• emptyfile 5y ago
  Instead of writing text let me make some more noise by shoving PDFs for no reason.
• pornel 5y ago
  Maybe the author doesn't realize how difficult PDF is to work with. In PDF it's ambiguous whether any two spans of text belong together in the same sentence or paragraph. It can even be unclear where are spaces between words. PDF also allows "optimizing" font usage that makes text unreadable without OCR-ing the custom font. The messy hacks go on and on: https://filingdb.com/b/pdf-text-extraction https://filingdb.com/b/pdf-text-extraction OTOH it's totally possible to make a self-contained HTML page without using a JS framework of the day. It's going to be way easier to consume than a PDF.
  • morsch 5y ago
    Case in point: copy-pasting a paragraph from his PDF-website adds line breaks everywhere. It also loses formatting (bold/italics) and the footnote superscript doesn't translate. PDF is an open standard, which is freely available2, and stable. It has a version number and many interoperable implementations including free and open source readers and editors. I think ease of copy-pasting is one of the coolest things about the document-centric roots of the web (along with the back button and hyperlinks; in other words, hypertext rules), although the modern web does break it (along with the back button and hyperlinks) in many places, so I can see where he is coming from. PDFs aren't the answer, though.
  • lifthrasiir 5y ago
    > OTOH it's totally possible to make a self-contained HTML page without using a JS framework of the day. I'm basically in agreement, but the author has a good point that PDF is obviously self-contained and self-contained HTML pages are not necessarily distinguishable from those that aren't. Perhaps we might have to revisit MHTML or embrace Web bundles as an alternative to PDF.
    • dtech 5y ago
      It's not even JS. I'd argue a HTML + inline JS page is a lot more self-contained than one with external images, videos and fonts. Note that PDFs can contain JS too.
      • 5y ago
• bambax 5y ago
  He should offer PDF in addition to basic HTML, not as a replacement.
• keiferski 5y ago
  I think if one designed a “crisis-proof” version of the web, it might end up being a network of PDFs. My reasoning being: - PDFs are universally understood by most people and can be read on phones, desktops, laptops, and eBook readers. - Once you’ve downloaded a local PDF version of the site, there is no risk that it can be changed or removed by the host. - File size is predictable ahead of time, which is useful if your connection is limited or slow. - PDFs are designed for printing (moreso than most sites) which may be useful in situations where electricity is in low supply.
  • Tajnymag 5y ago
    Except the printing part, all can be said about a standalone html file. External content, like images, can be inlined, thus you would only have to distribute one single .html file. I'm not sure how would file2file linking work in the realm of pdf files. With html files, it's easy even without any web server. Plus, html can be even digested through a terminal interface. That cannot be said about the binary nature of pdf documents.
    • nulbyte 5y ago
      I use a terminal pager with PDFs quite frequently. It works surprisingly well. Even something you wouldn't expect, like a pay stub, renders fine in the terminal.
      • bashinator 5y ago
        What do you use to display the pdf? Pandoc?
        • dredmorbius 5y ago
          Pandoc is a converter, not a viewer. Typically one would view a PDF with a dedicated viewer (xpdf, zathura, kpdf, Okular, Evince, ...), or by converting to text (pdftotext). less can be extended with hooks (lesspipe) to read a wide range of file types on the console. Some console file managers can also translate PDFs to text (mc, ranger).
• snksnk 5y ago
  Why not use TeX/LaTeX instead and also include a link to the code?
  • jimhefferon 5y ago
    The LaTeX below will leave a push-pin symbol in the text, and clicking on it shows the code. \documentclass{article} \usepackage{attachfile} \usepackage{lipsum} \begin{document}\expandafter\attachfile\expandafter{\jobname.tex} \lipsum[1-150] \end{document}
    • leephillips 5y ago
      Using xelatex, I got only the text, no pushbutton. Using pdflatex, I got a pushbutton, but it was not a hyperlink, just an image. What engine do you use to get this to work?
      • jimhefferon 5y ago
        I ran pdflatex from a 2017 TeX Live install under Ubuntu, and viewed in Acrobat Reader.
        • leephillips 5y ago
          Ahh, I think it is a viewer problem. Sadly, most viewers can not handle PDF attachments properly or at all.
• petercooper 5y ago
  In a sea of cynicism, I gotta say.. bravo. This genuinely put a smile on my face. It has a lot of problems, sure, but it's a creative use of the Web and would surely work for some use cases. It's certainly no worse than using Flash ever was. It reminds me a bit of a "newsletter" I'm subscribed to called, ironically, "Not a Newsletter" (http://notanewsletter.com/ http://notanewsletter.com/). You get an email from the author each month and it just points to a Google Doc where he puts the actual content. Why's this good? The content can't set off any spam filters, he can edit the issue after it's "sent" if there are mistakes or broken links..
  • sneak 5y ago
    The content can be censored arbitrarily by google, and when you click on mobile web with the docs app installed, it logs your logged in google account identity (maybe for work?) with the view when it switches to the app. Files have none of these problems.
    • petercooper 5y ago
      You're not wrong! It always a trade off of one set of problems for another with these sorts of things, I guess.
    • indigochill 5y ago
      If the author was concerned about getting censored by Google or feeding their data empire, they could set up a self-hosted Google Docs-like, like NextCloud. The readers would still need to trust the author's not doing anything nefarious with their IP addresses, but I guess there's a degree of implicit trust when subscribing to a newsletter.
      • noduerme 5y ago
        I would just put it on my own server. Are people really worried about clicking a private link and having their IP address logged? Just opening an email with a tracking pixel triggers that already, and you have to assume clicking a link will log your IP whether with Google or Constant Contact or any other mass email provider.
• zabzonk 5y ago
  Sorry, I'm not a Web developer - what is meant by "churn and noise" in this context?
• xvector 5y ago
  I think simple HTML + print to PDF (supported by default in most browsers) is a much more elegant solution.
  • opsecweather 5y ago
    Run it through outline.com first to remove all the ad-sidebars.
• Santosh83 5y ago
  Why not just publish static HTML with CSS only? It is, to my mind, better and more accessible than either PDF or a Javascript SPA.
  • TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    And if you bundle that HTML and CSS as an EPUB, it's just as self-contained as a PDF.
• dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
  I don't agree with author's choices (yes, I'm disciplined enough not to add irrelevant elements to my content), but it's really sad that things got to the point where someone actually suggests PDF as an alternative to the web.
• KEITH_PETERSON 5y ago
  I just opened your website on mobile and it's very user friendly, I got to scroll in many directions to read the content. We build our own website with gatsby and only use js if it's really needed (when you click interactive links, we're still trying to improve a bit. We customized Gatsby because doesn't support this out of the box) that gets 100 score on mobile on Google page speed: https://marxcommunications.com/ https://marxcommunications.com/ Proof: https://imgur.com/a/N4IJoEk https://imgur.com/a/N4IJoEk Or run it yourself: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmarxcommunications.com%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... It's possible but takes some work.
• shortformblog 5y ago
  Even though Jakob Nielsen is very much still alive, he’s rolling in his grave.
• trhoad 5y ago
  I just ran your PDF through an accessibility checker and it failed magnificently. For this reason alone, suggesting people make more use of PDFs instead of well-formatted HTML is a total non-starter for me (and should be for everyone).
  • robin_reala 5y ago
    It’s entirely possible to write accessible PDFs. It’s just that no-one does.
    • trhoad 5y ago
      It is indeed! And you're right, nobody does, including this example.
      • jfk13 5y ago
        And even if they did, many of the readers/viewers people use wouldn't fully support it. While it's possible to royally mess up accessibility in HTML, too, the chances of getting something usable are at least somewhat better.
  • john-doe 5y ago
    Even Word documents are more accessible than PDFs.
    • zinekeller 5y ago
      Heck, even PDFs produced by Word (or comparable FOSS editors) are so much better (except if you've done it incorrectly by "printing" it) than this particular one.
  • wy35 5y ago
    My thoughts exactly, I feel like it would be easier to write accessible webpages (given the wealth of accessibility tools).
  • Finnucane 5y ago
• cerved 5y ago
  this is a joke right?
  • jacamera 5y ago
    Yes. Though I think the real question is whether or not it was intentional.
• Symbiote 5y ago
  > PDFs used to be unreadable on small screens, but now you can reflowthem. (Pasted verbatim, retaining the missing space.) I don't see this feature in Firefox's viewer, or the default Android one. Can anyone recommend a FOSS PDF viewer that has it? (It must be FOSS, otherwise the point about using PDF to avoid tracking is lost.)
  • nulbyte 5y ago
    Book Reader can reflow PDFs. It is very simple,, which I like. But it adds any PDF you open to the library when you open the app, which I find only slightly annoying for non-books.
• GrumpyNl 5y ago
  Instead of pdf, why not the most basic HTML?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• eloisius 5y ago
  I'm not old enough to remember Gopher being "the internet" but I have browsed a few retro sites that still run it. I wouldn't mind seeing some slightly upgraded gopher-like protocol that allowed for embedding images and maybe form submissions (without any scripting). Most of what I want to do online is read, and I'd be more than happy for everything to come with a standardized look and feel rather than whatever scroll jacking weirdo design every website feels like having.
• dalbasal 5y ago
  I found "PDFs are files" kind of compelling. Perhaps this was a flaw of the original www concept. Web pages were always technically files & documents, but this was always abstracted away from userland. "Save webpage" was never a core feature. This did disempower users. PDFs are downloaded, saved, emailed around. They can also be linked to. Userland maintains a closer relationship with what's going on. A typical user know that you can have a copy of a file, which may or may not be identical to the online one. WWW, from its initial version, was mysterious. The transition between the model of requesting files from a server by clicking a link to a programmatically generated stream of code executed on your browser happened below typical users perspective. The wb has obviously gained a lot, but has also lost something.
  • BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    I've definitely used saved webpages a lot. When we had dialup email only, my dad would drive to the library with a flash drive and download Web pages to bring home and read. It was great. Of course, it's even greater now that I can load it fresh even faster.
• schipplock 5y ago
  The text is too small to read on my phone. I can zoom in, but then I have to scroll horizontally. I’m afraid this website isn’t targetting me.
• mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I also enjoyed the sentiment of the article. I used to blog a lot but in the last decade I have preferred more long form writing. Now I use the leanpub.com [1] service so when I write, I get generated PDF/ePub/Kindle formats, and material is readable online as HTML/CSS. For me leanpub is a way to make content free and accessible, but people can pay if they want. The relatively few people who pay for my material have a large effect on what I decide to write about in the future or which writing projects to drop. I consume the web mostly by following a few very interesting people on social media and following their links. As an author, my goal is to keep producing interesting enough material to be worth people's time reading. [1] https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson
• midrus 5y ago
  LOL
• stayux 5y ago
  Thanks. I am starting self-hosted blog about design fundamentals, best-practices, etc. Using only PDF is not a solution for me. Combining minimalistic web-site design with pdf/e-pub will suit me well. I like your approach as a statement against web "pollution".
• sammalloy 5y ago
  One problem I noticed on mobile, is that if I click on a link in the PDF and visit another page, and then try to traverse back, it takes me to the first page in the PDF, rather than the page I linked from.
• rado 5y ago
  This is terrible for accessibility. Please just use semantic HTML and your web will be usable on 10yo devices and unknown devices 10 years in the future.
• halayli 5y ago
  pdf a major attack surface too.
• SethMurphy 5y ago
  Naming or framing things in a difficult or obtuse way can be a good way to limit your audience. However, if it works others will follow and it will no longer be effective. I had a similar experience with a Meetup I once hosted which I specifically put in a location that was difficult (but admittedly becoming trendy). It worked for a bit but eventually attracted the crowd I was trying to alienate.
• wccrawford 5y ago
  I find it quite amusing that the author is railing against HTML at least in part because it's practically impossible to build a new web browser at this point, and then moves to PDF instead. In my time working with PDFs, I've found that generating them in ways that can be read with the most popular PDF readers is cryptic and difficult, and even parsing the ones made from the most popular creators is hard. I would definitely not pick PDF over HTML in regards to how easy it is to implement a good reader or writer. And there's plenty of authoring tools for HTML already, so the "ecosystem already exists for PDF" doesn't track either. Even the complaint about churn makes no sense to me, because there's no need to upgrade your tools constantly. If you're using something that produces good HTML today, it'll produce good HTML in a decade, too. OTOH, if you have a problem that could be automated, you're a lot more likely to be able to create that tool for HTML than PDF, and it's quite likely that someone else already has for HTML, but not PDF.
  • TheFreim 5y ago
    > In my time working with PDFs, I've found that generating them in ways that can be read with the most popular PDF readers is cryptic and difficult, and even parsing the ones made from the most popular creators is hard. Both pdf readers on my phone can't read the pdf, so this is definitely an issue.
• agomez314 5y ago
  Th author has a point in that many people want an online presence but the way the imagine it is more akin to a pamphlet or poster than a hyperlinked website. If that is the case, then pdf or a resizable image makes sense.
• fsiefken 5y ago
  Very good, I go for project gemini https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
• 101008 5y ago
  I've been doing something similar for 4 years now. I converted my niche website into a monthly magazine, that is released as a PDF (and also uploaded to Issuu). It has its good sides and bad sides. People will download the PDF every month when there is a new issue, but you don't know if they read it, how much time they spend on it, etc. You won't appear on Google Results as you would do if you posted the articles as HTML, etc. Based on my experience, I just keep doing it as an experiment and because I enjoy saying I run a digital magazine, but the true is that there is no real advantages on it.
  • jl6 5y ago
    > you don't know if they read it, how much time they spend on it, etc. This is an excellent feature, for the user.
    • 101008 5y ago
      Yes, for the user it has some advantages: . Download it and keep it forever. . Read offline. . Be able to share it through email, etc . Print it and read it in a nice place! (I encourage this) Of course, it has some downsides: . No responsive, so people who download it from a phone may hate it. . No accesibility.
• csomar 5y ago
  It's ironical that the author is pitching for PDF, and yet he is using a plethora of hyper-links. The big "invention" of the Web was linking pages together. That's what made it great. That's what created "Google" in the first place. Links in a PDF are supposed to take you to a browser or open a different PDF file? PDF is a step back. If you are angry about the overblown size of JavaScript and resources consumption, use a simple static website. It doesn't get easier than that.
  • alisonkisk 5y ago
    You're conflating browsers with markup language. Clicking an HTML link opens a different HTML file.
• SMAAART 5y ago
  Well, that's innovative. but, why not HTML 2?
• saint-loup 5y ago
  This experiment is interesting, but not so bold or novel when you consider the culture around making zines (small, DIY, often quirky magazines). The creativity there is amazing and medium-wise it's often "hybrid" (print-oriented but shared online). For instance there's this tool to help creating zines. https://alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-maker https://alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-maker
• BaldricksGhost 5y ago
  How about plain old HTML? Might not be as pretty but it sure beats a bloated PDF.
  • npteljes 5y ago
    It also wouldn't be upvoted on HN. I agree that a static page generator would have been a much more fitting technology (for example). But sometimes you gotta sacrifice that for visibility.
• croes 5y ago
  Now fight https://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consumption/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consump...
• yesenadam 5y ago
  This was a great read. I'm sympathetic! I've had a website (Wordpress) for almost 10 years, but have stopped adding stuff to it lately, because I'm sick of the formatting changing on pages! I look again at a page that used to look great, now the vertical spacing is wrong, or tables have gone out of shape, or the font has changed to something awful. Maybe it's wordpress, maybe it's my bad css/html skills, maybe something else, not sure. I picked up LaTeX skills about 5 years ago and have just been making lovely PDF books of everything I'm into. And they stay just the way I made them. Kind of a shame though, no-one else gets to see them. Yet.
• janandonly 5y ago
  PDF-fing everything on your website is one way to go about it... I personally use the service at printfriendly [1] and Arc90's Readability to make un-crufted and readable PDF files of web content that is worth saving for the coming decades. Added bonus: by saving these very small files on my system pressing the Command + Spacebar on my system I can easily search through my multiple decades of interesting files... [1] https://www.printfriendly.com https://www.printfriendly.com [2] https://ejucovy.github.io/readability/ https://ejucovy.github.io/readability/
• croes 5y ago
  Useless rant. His choice won't change the rest of the internet and for his site he could easily write lean html without all the stuff he complains about.
• pharke 5y ago
  Isn't this what IPFS is for?
  • knownjorbist 5y ago
    I'm surprised that IPFS and others aren't mentioned more here. The solution is staring us in the face, it's related to cryptography.
• temporallobe 5y ago
  Why not just extremely simple, plain HTML? No frameworks, not even CSS. In fact, you could make your life even simpler by using markdown files and having the browser convert that to HTML in real time with a single JS library (there are a few, I am not promoting anything one particular), so it doesn’t even require a “back end”! Plain HTML, while not having all the “portable” attributes of PDF, is still pretty darn robust and most browsers handle printing (or conversion to PDF) quite well.
  • prox 5y ago
    I think it is because PDF is a document first, and HTML often hard to save/file. PDF is also able to create with design in mind, in a document creation app, which after decades of HTML is still hard to do I think.
    • BenjiWiebe 5y ago
      HTML isn't hard to save and file on a computer, and on phones it seems everything is hard to save and file.
      • prox 5y ago
        You are right in a technical sense, but if I ask someone who is a low level user to save a webpage, most don’t know how to do that. It’s not front and center or even encouraged! This makes a big difference for adaption.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    Some of the listed benefits don't apply. Notably paginated (PDF) vs. scrolled navigation, but also features such as formulae displays and specific typesetting / layout elements, in-page bookmarks, highlighting, and notes. For shorter documents that's not much of a problem. For anything much over ~chapter length (about 20 pages or 10,000 words), navigation within a single HTML page becomes painful. Well below that level on smaller devices
• chrismorgan 5y ago
  One previous discussion in comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24257982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24257982 For my part, I expressed bafflement because the end result seems worse than the starting point in almost every way, including those that the author was complaining about the web for. (There are a couple of others to be found in https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22lab6.com%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., but not so substantial.)
• everyone 5y ago
  "with no external dependencies to manage." Except for like, the software which reads and renders the pdf, which may not be available on current or future OSes. I dont see how this is any different to writing a static webpage.
• bmn__ 5y ago
  It is too early to displace HTML with PDF. > PDFs used to be inaccessible My eyes are not very good. I have trouble reading the font in the PDF. I am using Firefox. HTML lets me pick that a font that I can read easily. I cannot do that with PDF. > PDFs used to be unreadable on small screens, but now you can reflow them. I am using Firefox. I cannot do that. Realistically, how many years will I have to wait until Firefox catches up? Over twenty years ago, I learnt Web authoring by examining the source which had a profound effect on my career. That serendipitous opportunity I had with human-readable sources will be lost to the next generation with PDF - they have to learn the technology deliberately.
  • Santosh83 5y ago
    As far as I know, it is nothing specific to Firefox. You can't set your own PDF font or reflow a non-reflowable PDF in any browser.
    • chrismorgan 5y ago
      Brief investigation suggests reflow is a super-clumsy, ultra-coarse-grained view mode that is implemented by few clients, is not easy to access, is not well known, and is vastly inferior to what you can get on the web, especially as it’s basically text-only. In Adobe Acrobat (and I’m guessing Adobe Reader): Choose View → Zoom → Reflow, and it turns everything into one column of nigh-unformatted text. (Word looks like it may support it, but that could be more that it’s converted it to a Word document in some way and reflow-like functionality falls out of that naturally, though I imagine the tagging would help with the conversion; and someone in this thread mentions something called “Book Reader” supporting it.)
  • silon42 5y ago
    >It is too early to displace HTML with PDF. 'Never' will be too early. >Realistically, how many years will I have to wait until Firefox catches up? They should better improve reflow for HTML on small devices first. Focusing on PDF is a waste of resources.
    • 5y ago
• westcort 5y ago
  While I agree with the thesis, I believe it it possible to do things like this with vanilla HTML. For example, I created a search engine that is just a static HTML page: www.locserendipity.com
• noduerme 5y ago
  I read this entire document. If you've ever had to write a PDF-to-text parser - and God help you, I have - you will beg for Flash to come back as a web standard. [edit] Generally though, I'm sympathetic with your point and it's kind of like why zines regained popularity in the 90s (and samizdat in the Soviet Union before that)... controlling your own publishing is a powerful idea. Anyone can do that though, without resorting to obscure formats, unless obfuscation is the point.
  • taftster 5y ago
    $> cat file.pdf | strings Done. /s
    • boramalper 5y ago
      Stop cat abuse! /s $> strings file.pdf
      • taftster 5y ago
        $> strings < file.pdf ?? /s/s
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    The Poppler library's pdftotext is remarkably effective.
• monkeynotes 5y ago
  * PDFs are self-contained and offlineable HTML can easily be offline-able. Base64 your images or use SVG, put your CSS in the HTML page, remove all 2-way data interaction, basically reduce HTML to the same performance as PDF and allow it to be downloaded. * PDFs are files HTML is files * PDFs are decentralised This should be "PDFs can be decentralised". PDFs aren't inherently any more decentralised than any other kind of file, including HTML. The store is the thing that becomes decentralised, not the content. * PDFs are page-oriented HTML can be page-oriented. Simply build your website with pagination. PDFs can also be abused to have hugely long pages. Bad UX can be encapsulated in any medium. * PDFs used to be large (bla bla bla Javascript weighs a lot) Nope, PDFs are still objectively larger than the equivalent HTML. PDFs don't have any dynamic interaction, rip all that out and produce the HTML of yesteryear and your HTML will be tiny in comparison to the PDF. Edit: I'm sorry, the more I think about this the dumber I feel. The web is useful because it's 2-way. I am excited by the web because I can interact with other people. I come to hacker news to engage with thinkers, not to just read a published article from one single author. I want to read ad-hoc opinions and user submitted content. PDF web, really?
  • playpause 5y ago
    These all seem like technical quibbles that miss the point.
    • wlesieutre 5y ago
      Unless I'm on a paper-sized tablet I would definitely rather have an offline HTML file than a PDF. Nobody likes to pan back and forth on lines of text to read something.
      • Robotbeat 5y ago
        I had the exact opposite reaction. I’m reading this on an iPhone SE2020, and I MUCH appreciate reading this in pdf form. I didn’t have to pan back and forth or even put the phone in landscape orientation. This is one of the smallest smartphones you can still buy, and the experience of PDF is WAY better than the user-hostile auto-flow text forced down mobile users’ throats. I was skeptical at first, but I think the author made the point fantastically well.
• Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  "And for that reason I am creating a 1 MB behemoth that you need to download to read 3000 words or so."
• millerm 5y ago
  Yeah, 10 second load time, tiny text on a mobile device. No thanks. Sucks that people went for over-styling every site making everything painful to publish. I’d be happy with 90’s static HTML, and a few images when needed. I seek information, not “an experience”.
  • AlexAffe 5y ago
    Exactly this. It is by the way one of the main reasons I initially stuck with HN. The lean UI, text based simplicity, efficiently conveying information had me instantly. I would sacrifize styling for speed anytime, everywhere.
  • Robotbeat 5y ago
    On the contrary, I much prefer a small text on a mobile device to the reflowed text on a mobile device that we’re always forced to use. The PDF is also the same view as on a desktop, so if I look at it on another device, my spatial memory of where stuff is remains intact.
    • millerm 5y ago
      Might as well just generate a PNG. The text is too small for me on a mobile device. PDFs main goal was print. The fonts are awful for the screen and no ability to reflow the text. I can deal with things moving around, I don't need spatial memory for that. Just give good titles, headers, and indexes. Again, we can do this with simple HTML, embed images and styles. It's all there. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, people don't really publish information anymore. It's mainly for "experience" and for "looks". Marketing, and advertising, now drive the information era. The "Information Super Highway" is now just a crumbling road plastered with billboards. Most content is useless, and is there for clicks. Heck, I'd rather someone post their site in digests in e-book formats than PDF.
  • fbrchps 5y ago
    Exactly my reaction to opening the site. I had no idea what the content of the site was (besides the title from HN) and around the 50% download point, I had already lost interest. I'm clearly not the only one who loses interest this quick [0][1][2]. Also, as others have mentioned in root level comments, the design & layout of the content within is also severely lacking, which makes waiting for the load to occur even less worth it. --- [0]: https://www.pingdom.com/blog/page-load-time-really-affect-bounce-rate/ https://www.pingdom.com/blog/page-load-time-really-affect-bo... (2018) [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/03/31/firefox-page-load-speed-part-i/ https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/03/31/firefox-page-loa... (2010) [2]: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/page-load-time-statistics/ https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and... (I know it's Google, but to be fair they have more data on this than most other companies, despite their obvious desire to sell more of their product/services related to it.)
• dahfizz 5y ago
  If this catches on, there will be "JS in PDF" in no time.
  • MawKKe 5y ago
    as in "it exists already"?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• specialist 5y ago
  OC page three: > PDFs used to be unreadable on small screens, but now you can reflow them. Off hand, which PDF viewers do reflow?
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    Foxit, PocketBook Reader, FBReader. Presumably Adobe Acrobat though I've not touched that in a decade or more. There are also utlities such as the poppler library's pdftotext which will dump ASCII / bare text from at least some PDFs.
• lucian1900 5y ago
  Sounds to me like ePub would fit better. It’s designed for reflow and it’s built out of a subset of HTML. Worse case the contents of the file can be expanded.
• ok123456 5y ago
  Jekyll plugin that produces a pdf version of each page?
• tonis2 5y ago
  What a nice website, what framework is it built with ? Maybe Vue.js or Angular.js or maybe Nuxt fuking js ?
• jedimastert 5y ago
  I find this to be a super interesting response. When I settled into my current website design, I ended up basically writing an article for the homepage. I'm not a designer by any stretch, and it was the most attractive homepage I could make, and I still really like it. I used a very similar workflow (and continue to for articles) to the papers I wrote in college, and would really only take one more step to get that to final pdf state. I'm torn between leaning into the static nature of the site and implementing the wiki I've been thinking about making
• cochne 5y ago
  As someone who works with PDFs a lot, please don't. PDFs are awful in every case except those which require a very precise visual layout. From reading the article, I do not see a single case in which PDF is superior to vanilla HTML.
• blacktriangle 5y ago
  "HTML’s semantic capabilities were oversold." THANK YOU! HTML semantics are a trap, just enough to make you think something is there but anemic enough to be a giant excersize in bikesheading. Ask yourself this: If HTML semantics were adequate, why do we have ARIA and 90 different microformats? Other than that, I read the article expecting to be annoyed by the PDF presentation but was pleasantly surprised by how it read just like I would want a content page to read. My only complaint is that browsers (at least Brave) do not preserve scroll position in PDFs. If the browsers fix that the author may be onto something here.
• gtirloni 5y ago
  I can't read this in my phone. There's no automatic layout and the fonts are too small. Zooming in works but it's a nightmare to navigate. This is an accessibility disaster.
• divbzero 5y ago
  I like the spirit of this but would prefer text or static HTML over PDF as choice of file format.
• cunthorpe 5y ago
  Please somebody bake an icon into the browser that turns green when websites are lightweight and content-only and make it affect Google rankings. We don’t need PDF sites, we need incentives for publishing acceptable websites. Side note: I’d honestly love for the government to step in and outright outlaw some obvious and intentional dark patterns (example: California unsubscribe law)
  • titzer 5y ago
    > make it affect Google rankings. Google is never going to make a change to its rankings that interferes with its real goal of 23% YoY revenue growth.
    • blacktriangle 5y ago
      Is that actually an internal Google goal? If so, dear god, no wonder they are so willing to sacrifice the long term health of the internet in return for short term hypergrowth. No company Google's size can grow that fast without some serious dark patterns and user abuse.
      • titzer 5y ago
        You don't end up with that level of growth year over year for 20 years straight by accident. It is an unwritten assumption that missing 20% growth is a fail. I worked at Google almost 10 years and watched the dog and pony show (aka TGIF) from the inside. The real story is on the quarterly financial reports.
• afavour 5y ago
  Didn’t expect I’d see a top post on HN defending the page-centric nature of PDFs. A pager format is awful for anything other than printing out pages. But hey, it’s a big wide web, you do you. But I won’t be reading.
• atemerev 5y ago
  "But stable standards are incredibly important.They allow software, at least in theory, to be finished. Why is it importantthat software be finished? Because it gives us hope that we might end thechurn and fix all the bugs! I want to use software whose version number is7 1.0. I want to use software whose every line of code has been studied,analysed, optimised and punishingly tested. I want every component andsubcomponent and every interaction and every configuration to beexquisitely documented, and taught in courses, and painstakinglydeconstructed and proven sound" Sorry, not possible. Never, ever. Software does not work like that. Bugs will never be fixed (if they could, the software in question would have become obsolete long ago). By the way, this is what you get when you try to copypaste text from this "website".
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  PDF has quite the attack surface. It supports Javascript, 3D models, JBIG2 compression that turns 8's into 6's and all sorts of strange things.
• api 5y ago
  The point about the size of the W3C spec is hilarious, but I wonder how much of that hundred million plus words is actually necessary to implement the parts of the spec that people use? Surely it would be possible to create a spec that captured the most useful subset of HTML and CSS functionality. In any case if the spec really is that huge the W3C should be written off. Any organization that produces a spec like that is worthless.
• leephillips 5y ago
  We already have a wildly popular website where all the main content is in the form of PDFs. It’s https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/. PDF is what you use when your document needs to have a predictable layout. This is especially important if it contains math, complex tables, or any elements where meaning is carried by positioning on the page. This can include aesthetic meaning, as in some forms of poetry that need to be laid out in a particular way.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    There are several which at least strongly resemble that remark. Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive's text archives (along with numerous other document-oriented sites, several of the samizdat variety) offer content in PDF and other document-oriented offline downloadable forats. Wikipedia has a "save to PDF" link on each article (that seems to work through the browser's capabilities, if any, not all browsers support this). The sister Mediawiki site Wikisource offers ePub downloads. For longer-form content, PDF, DJVU, and a handful of other formats (arguably ePub) are at least reasonably popular.
• danShumway 5y ago
  I guess by modern standards this load time is acceptable, but when you argue that PDFs are a way to move forward, you're competing with HTML 4/5. And by that standard: - Crud this website is so slow. Unacceptably slow. If your technology stack is spending 10 seconds just to fetch and render 13 pages of large-screen text, then either you're doing something wrong or it's a bad technology stack. That load time alone should kill this idea. - There's no way for me to turn off images. This is the opposite of a client-respecting webpage, the only way you could make it worse is by rendering to Canvas or shipping me a PNG. My mobile browser doesn't fetch fonts by default. You're overriding my choice to do that. - Mobile? Reflow? Responsive design? Adjustable font sizes? The author kind of offhandedly says that PDFs can do reflow right now, but how many clients actually support that. Does the PDF format handle this by default? - Saying "you can technically make PDF accessible" is exactly the same as saying "you can technically use just a subset of HTML." It's the same argument. Nobody does it, PDFs are generally hostile to accessibility, and there's no way to signal that a PDF is accessible or enforce it as a community standard. So, the much bigger question: what's wrong with Gemini[0]? I've been critical of Gemini in the past on multiple fronts, but if you are in this space where you want to burn everything down and make your blog static, Gemini really does seem to solve every problem that the author has, except better. It's also trivial to proxy Gemini documents or statically re-render them to HTML, which makes them accessible to people outside the community. And by default, they're both pretty accessible to screen readers, and much more efficient than what the author is proposing. The author argues that using static HTML wouldn't be good enough because there's no standard that forces you to exclude Javascript. Then they point to PDF/A, which is not a standard that is enforced by most browser PDF viewers. To me, this argument isn't any different from telling website authors to choose not to use Javascript, what is going to force anyone to use PDF/A? Every web browser PDF reader supports Javascript. NoScript support in Firefox is better than the controls/extensions for disabling PDF scripting. And Gemini is right there: for the most part it's actually working today. So I just don't get it. Why pick a technology that's tangibly worse than the web on (and I mean this quite literally) almost every single axis and every single metric, when you could instead switch to a markup language that actually does have use-cases, that does simplify deployment and blogging in some instances, that does have a real community, that does have some real advantages over HTML, that does have some real momentum behind it, and that doesn't disrespect my choices about what fonts/images I want to download? [0]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
• marbu 5y ago
  I don't consider using pdf for this purpose a good idea. It would be better to have a static html pages, with reference to epub with the same content. One can have both generated from the same source with a static site generator.
• X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it any more" but for webtech. It's totally unclear why they don't just use a subset
• saltdoo 5y ago
  I'm on mobile and unable to open any links in this pdf after opening with three different pdf viewing apps. :/
• maccard 5y ago
  I've always wondered why some sites can serve PDFs that my browser (firefox) can view inline (my preferred method), rather than forcing me to download the file and open in a separate application
  • chrismorgan 5y ago
    It depends on the Content-Disposition header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Disposition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co.... There are extensions that let you intercept this header, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/no-pdf-download/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/no-pdf-downlo... which per https://github.com/MorbZ/no-pdf-download/blob/c924d657f33398e2a3a51a7a67608b6156a99124/app/src/headers.js https://github.com/MorbZ/no-pdf-download/blob/c924d657f33398... detects the content-type and if it’s PDFy replaces the content-disposition header with “inline”. (Clicking on a link that has the download attribute set also affects things: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorElement/download https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorE....)
    • maccard 5y ago
      Today I am one of the lucky 10,000 [0]. I learned about a new header, and fixed an issue I've had for _years_ [0] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• SynapsePixels 5y ago
  * PDFs used to be inaccessible, but now you can tag them. This PDF is not accessibility compliant.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• duxup 5y ago
  My kids school used to send links to google docs for their announcements, I hated it. I pretty much hate any system like that, it's purely extra steps on the web. In both email, and the browser I'm already in a program that displays text and images and cool stuff. So then I'm just sent a link to someplace else that does the same thing? So then what? Is it all just "pdf can do that too", but with extra steps...? I can print to PDF in most browsers if I want, but in this case it isn't a choice. The idea that I might save and store the school emails or that website and somehow manage those files seems kinda self important in a way ... I don't mean that as a personal attack, just that this idea that they imagine me taking the time to do that with their content? When otherwise it could have just been an accessible web page? How many people care to do that? If I'm visiting a website I'm almost certainly not interested in saving your content / managing it... almost never. I'm a little lost on the whole 'page-oriented' idea too. That's just a limitation of paper, and it's a pain / disruptive more often than not. Even the 'page oriented' section is broken up by the page and some extra text at the bottom of the page that is irrelevant to the paragraph... If folks want a 'save to pdf' option might be nice to add, or the user can just print to pdf...
• msoad 5y ago
  Company's S-1 documents are shared on Hacker News. SEC publishes them in both PDF and HTML. Guess which one works better? It's not the fault of HTML standard if people are using React plus 20 different libraries for a simple static content
• Ajedi32 5y ago
  This is an awful idea and I love it. As others have pointed out it's strictly worse than a static HTML site in many, many ways. At the same time though, it's a brilliant criticism of many of the worst aspects of the modern web. This is art.
• leephillips 5y ago
  A related idea is making a website entirely from SVG. Here is a lovely example: https://ozake.com/ https://ozake.com/
• qwerty456127 5y ago
  PDF is very far from an ideal format for the today world of different-sized screens. It is a horrible experience on mobile and even worse on eInk pocket books. I would rather advocate making everything available in ePub. Or even better - FB2, it is an easy to grok/implement (designed with manual authoring, simple scripted processing and low-end devices in mind) single-xml structure decoupling the content from the view even more. I often convert ePubs to FB2 (with Pandoc and Calibre) to make PocketBook render them in its native fonts (which always are better) rather than in the font specified in the ePub. I would also mention that the text within PDFs often is not machine-readable (you copy-paste it and get text without spaces, with additional spaces or complete garbage) but I believe this is easily avoidable if you bake PDFs a proper way. I could also suggest publishing everything in Markdown (with images embedded in a Base64 section in the bottom) but this doesn't seem practical because browsers, book-reading apps and eInk devices don't support nice rendering of them directly. > “But how can I implement shiny whizz-bang features that will engage readers and drive conversions?!” You can’t. PDF is boring It's not. It supports JavaScript, embedded video and other kinds of active content. Sadly.
• DocTomoe 5y ago
  This sounds like the Creative Director I worked with, ca. 1998, who bemoaned that he couldn't have pixel-perfect layouts over a wide variety of devices/browsers/operating systems.
• ColinWright 5y ago
  For reference, the original title was: We are drowning in churn and noise. I am fighting by switching this site to PDF I find the "actual" title unhelpful, unenlightening, uninformative, and uninviting, which I why I originally chose text taken directly from the page, so people would know what it was about before taking the time to click and read. I know why the HN mods have changed it to "Deurbanising the Web", but I wish they'd keep more informative titles, especially when taken from the article in question.
  • failwhaleshark 5y ago
    I didn't understand what it meant. I thought it was a euphemism for gentrification. None of their knee-jerk, dilettante, low-effort rant clearly identifies what they're really mad about, or if they're just mad to be mad. It feels like a waste of everyone's time.
• rerx 5y ago
  When I click on the submitted link with Chrome on Android, it asks me if I want to redownload "0.pdf". Such a confusing question. If I pick the wrong answer, I end up with some restaurant menu I must have looked at months ago, not what the global poster intended. So for non-confusing real-world UX I'd recommend extra care with file names if you want to go PDF only.
• clearing 5y ago
  I honestly can't believe all the praise for HTML and web on HN in the face of this awesome critique. I hugely appreciate the love for actual files. >• PDFs are decentralised. You may have obtained this PDF from a website, or maybe not! Self-contained static files are liberating! They stand alone and are not dependent on being hosted by any particular web server or under any particular domain. You can publish to one host or to a thousand hosts or to none, and it maintains its identity through content-addressing, not through the blessing of a distributor. This seems to have gotten lost in the offense everyone has taken over the choice to not use 'simple HTML', despite the document's clear reasoning that to do even that would embed the content deep in the 'urban web'. All of these simple-complex propositions about making some subset language or automating document flows are missing the point entirely.
  • danShumway 5y ago
    > You can publish to one host or to a thousand hosts or to none, and it maintains its identity through content-addressing, not through the blessing of a distributor. It kind of seems like you're describing IPFS, except with worse content addressing guarantees. The vast majority of your users will never check to see if a PDF's content actually match its content address. > All of these simple-complex propositions about making some subset language or automating document flows are missing the point entirely. Are they? It's really not that hard to build a self-contained HTML file, and to re-emphasize, signed PDFs and signed HTML files are about the same level of accessibility to most users. Web browsers don't really handle either, if you want those guarantees you need to use a protocol/technology with better support right from the start. Also to be clear, despite the author's argument that PDFs can be self-contained, no browser guarantees that, and there's no way for me to tell if the PDF is self contained when I click on it in Firefox unless I download it and check it myself offline or in a viewer that guarantees it won't make network requests. Nothing online that I'm aware of forces authors to use PDF/A, so when I download a PDF, I don't know what I'm getting. It's not actually the magical, re-hostable world that the author claims. I'm not sure that people are missing the author's point so much as they're saying the author is making claims about the portability of PDFs that aren't necessarily accurate. Yes, it would be good to have better self-contained guarantees about some web-content, but I'm not sure PDFs actually supply any of those guarantees.
• aenigma 5y ago
  Great article - so much depth and accuracy to this! I see a lot of discussion about the semantics of pdfs but I think those are missing the overarching theme here. Feels like this is more about the fact that websites have become increasingly dynamic, unstable, unreliable, inconsistent, etc. - pdfs offer something like a book, static, stable, reliable and consistent. Think about a book you can turn to a specific page no matter how many times you look at it and the print is the same, the information is the same, you can do the same action over and over again and get the same expected result. Now imagine opening a book and you could have sworn that the chapter you wanted to reference was 11 but now it's 16 and the images are different, the examples are different, in fact the quote that you wanted to use for reference no longer exists in the book. There's an insanity to this experience but it's exactly what the web is like - a book that is constantly changing, upended changed - even disappearing entirely. I could have sworn I had bought that book on discrete mathematics - how could it be gone? oh that's right the server managing site is powered off - book no longer even exists.
• uncomputation 5y ago
  I cannot tell if this is satirical or not. Assuming it is not, every single “pro” of PDFs is just plain incorrect except for the one about being “self-contained” to which I point to https://gwern.net https://gwern.net as a good example of self-contained HTML. Gwern archives all the pages he references so that they are always available. In the case this is satire, I applaud it because I did get a few chuckles.
  • bittercynic 5y ago
    In the words of the great Ivan Stang: "I'm joking AND I'm serious!" *I'm not the author, just thought the sentiment from that quote applied here.
• leephillips 5y ago
  There are good points here, but I think the author slightly undermines his message because the layout and typography of this particular PDF is so poor. Probably because it “was written in the world’s greatest web authoring tool: LibreOffice Writer”. In other words, one advantage of PDF is that free authoring tools such as the TeX family can create typographically beautiful results that are nearly impossible to achieve with HTML, but he leaves that on the table.
• ussrlongbow 5y ago
  Very surprised to see just few comments mentioning EPUB, which is IMO is much more suitable for document-centric approach. An open standard with freely available[1] specification and never had any problems with EPUBs on PC, tablets and phones. [1] - https://www.w3.org/publishing/epub32/epub-spec.html#sec-intro-epub-specs https://www.w3.org/publishing/epub32/epub-spec.html#sec-intr...
  • DerDangDerDang 5y ago
    There’s a fixed layout version of the ePub standard too, allowing PDF quality if that’s what you’re after.
  • shuntress 5y ago
    Also worth pointing out, EPUBs are (or, at least, can be. I'm not sure how much flexibility is in the specifications) basically just bundled HTML.
  • kccqzy 5y ago
    But can you open an epub in a browser? That's the main point here.
    • ussrlongbow 5y ago
      Yes, but with the plugin
    • spinax 5y ago
      Not only simple browser plugins per the other reply (and a plethora of non-crashing mobile apps, whereas mobile PDF reading apps crash on me all the time) - the ePub format is just a zip file in disguise with plain text (HTML) inside and maybe some images/etc. In a manner of speaking, ePub as a design has an inherent built-in fallback mechanism to manually obtain the internal content in case of failure - including ability to try and repair a broken zip format (zip -F/-FF) and grep it in place (zipgrep).
• failwhaleshark 5y ago
  Cut off your nose to spite your audience. PDF is meant for viewing and printing books. It's not very good for browsing and requires PDF viewers. All of the browser add-ons, functionality, and behaviors are lost by forcing people to use a PDF viewer. HTML is meant primarily for browsing but it can also be used for print media. CSS can specify paper sizes. If someone were so worried about external media, they can host it themselves or roll their own CDN. If they were so worried about fonts, they can include them themselves. It's more semantic web-compatible to describe a website with RDF and have PDF, EPUB, DJVU, MOBI, TXT, PS, etc. links there and also in the webpage. This is how you provide the most accessibility. Furthermore, using a meta document language like LaTeX or something XML that can transform into other document artifact forms mechanically is the way to go.
• ergot_vacation 5y ago
  The sad thing is, this is what the web was SUPPOSED to be, more or less: a series of static documents, text and images. The only interactivity (setting aside the occasional CGI forms) was that you could click certain images or text and go to other static documents. Documents linked to documents. Then everyone lost their minds and decided webpages needed to be PROGRAMS and we've been paying the price ever since.
• admax88q 5y ago
  Well this sucked to read on mobile. I'll stick to HTML.
• mattnewton 5y ago
  I can’t tell if this is satire or not, because reading it on my phone hurt my eyes after the first couple pages. Please use EPub if you are after an open format or freeze web pages into an offline-able format and don’t use PDF.
• richardwhiuk 5y ago
  You can server side render PDFs and make them dynamic if you wanted to.
• apotheon 5y ago
  Why does it seem like almost everyone doesn't realize that PDFs can easily be made to support all the horrors we see in HTML? No, it's fucking well not impossible -- or even notably difficult -- to jam some malicious dynamic code into a PDF. The only reason a period of widespread fear about PDF viruses hasn't developed as it has for websites spreading malicious code is the fact that websites got much more widely adopted. PDFs have been used as malicious code vectors before, and replacing HTML with PDFs would only result in PDFs being the new common vector for the same problem, with at least the same scale and intensity. This only seems like a solution if you don't know what PDFs can do -- and, by the way, sometimes pagination is bad, especially static (non-reflow) pagination. EDIT: Let's make this clearer. You can actually embed an entire JavaScript application in a PDF. Tell me again how PDFs somehow prevent the problem of dynamic pages on the web. All using PDFs instead of HTML pages would do is wrap the horrors of the web in forms that are generally more hostile to various viewing contexts for the less harmful use cases (e.g. static pages suddenly being harder to read in some contexts with PDFs than with HTML pages).
• pseingatl 5y ago
  Most people think that pdf's have to be letter or A4 size, but you can make them at A7 or A8 for a phone screen, or for that matter, any size you want. PDF is size-agnostic. There's nothing to stop you from creating documents the size of a phone screen. So you could put the phone screen-sized pdf at m.mysite.com and this small screen illegible complaint is solved.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    The site would be inspired to automatically detect device sizes (JS or CSS media queries) and offer an appropriately-scaled PDF download option. Unfortunatly it didn't opt for that.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• eaton 5y ago
  The whole post boils down to: "HTML is bad because it has scope creep and people use it for bad things, but PDF is good because I made this particular document in a way I like for a use case I prefer." You do you, man! Some people run Archie servers, some people create a directory full of PDFs.
• ccorcos 5y ago
  "Files are a basic human freedom" - that definitely resonates with me. There's an assortment of trade-offs though. In particular, linking between files breaks if you ever want to move or rename a file. Also, by self-encapsulating every file, you end up using space less efficiently.
• sbazerque 5y ago
  I like the idea of keeping HTML's document-centric original design, but accessing the documents using p2p protocols (instead of the client-server model used on the web). I'm working on an open-source implementation of this idea at https://www.hyperhyperspace.org https://www.hyperhyperspace.org
• 8note 5y ago
  "PDFs are self contained, and can't be broken by an API going down" Is directly broken by "PDFs are part of the web, and part of the content can be by reference to a webpage" If that webpage goes down, that link it broken. That decentralized bit still needs to conform to broken copyright laws too. You can't just download a pdf then rehost it on your own without a license to do so .... There's also a big difference between a city and the modern web. We own the infrastructure in a city, vs rich people own it on the web. Rather than a city, the web is more like a company town. I don't think that's any different for pdfs either. The distribution is still coming from a web server owned by a company -- the real response is self hosting of your stuff, and self hosting by your friends for their stuff. The file format doesn't make it self hosted
• 9876545678 5y ago
  Comments here are disappointing. The problem with any of this is getting any momentum, so given the level of pushback, pdf might not be it. Having to be a specific version of pdf probably doesn't help. Creating new spec is hopeless as well unless you are someone very famous and can manage to get enough people to adopt. There's text/markdown mediatype which can also serve this purpose but it needs a boost from someone with some street cred. People work in predictable ways and this is a political project. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7763 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7763
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  Long sympathetic with the Jacob Nielsen / PDF bad camp ... I've had some recent changes of heart. Not a full convert, but PDF is often superior to HTML, especially for longer-form and complex noninteractive content. Books are an artefact whose design has evolved over the centuries to accommodate human-scale ergonomics: font size, paper and ink colour, words per line, lines per page, pages per volume, overall weight and dimensions. Standard-sized books are all larger than the largest current mobile phones, with diagonal measures of about 9--12 inches. There are smaller and larger books, but those are compromises either to portability (pocketbooks) or to large-format resolution and detail ("coffee table" books, atlases, and the like). Magazines tend to run even larger (about 13"), broadsheet newspapers larger yet. Most criticisms of PDFs are actually criticisms of the devices and displays used to read them. Poor resolution, incorrect aspect ratios, and small display sizes (especially mobile devices) are the key problems. Reading PDFs on a tablet, especially a larger e-ink device, is a game-changer. I now actively avoid HTML, or at least launch it in a browser designed with e-ink in mind (EInkBro: https://github.com/plateaukao/browser https://github.com/plateaukao/browser). Otherwise, my large (13.3") high-DPI (200+) B&W ebook reader is an excellent long-form immersive reading tool. The key requirement of a mobile phone is that it fit in a pocket, handbag, or purse. They are too small for reading, and aren't designed for that purpose. Current devices feature screen sizes of roughly 5--7 inches (diagonal measurement). At the lower end, that's smaller than a 3x5 index card (6"), and the largest barely the size of a 4x6 card (7"). On desktops, the first display that offered what I felt was a truly comfortable two-pages-up PDF reading experience was the 27" Retina iMac. Its 5K display (itself an oddball size) suits document work well. Even not fully maximised, most books are highly readable (leaving screen space for other tasks), and at full maximisation, details really stand out especially from scans of historical editions. (Such details aren't always relevent, but often are.) PDF also provides capabilities HTML either cannot or does not by default (and few seem to be persuaded to offer), especially pagination, formulae, and a spatially-persistent layout (if you have a spatial memory, this is very valuable). PDFs can though often do not include internal navigation (chapters, sections, etc.), search (if full text is included), and most critically, metadata (at a minimum, author, title, date, and publisher, see the full Dublin Core metadata specification for what should be required). PDFs can also be published directly to device sizes (or to a set of form factors encompassing typical devices), as several others note. Some of the issues aren't entirely intrinsic, and my feeling is that wider use of PDFs for online content would lead to a proliferation of PDF annoyances to match present-day Web annoyances. In each case, the fundamental problem is that publishers rather than readers have final say over presentation. An alternative, of distributing raw minimum markup and formatting that to user specifications following a set number of templates ... might help. It's ironic that the article here embodies a number of PDF annoyances: - The shaded background renders quite poorly on a B&W e-ink reader (though can be eliminated with a watermark-removal setting). - The filename provides no clues as to contents or provenance, and is likely to collide with other content. - I'm a fan of serif fonts, not sans serif, for high-DPI reading. - Internal and external hyperlink support is ... variable. At times utterly missing, at others, inconsistent or inconvenient. - PDFs are not trivially directly editable, which means both authors and readers can change errors or address issues. - Many PDFs lack internal structure, even where the document they encompass do. The number of books lacking PDF table-of-contents support is ... large. - Metadata standards and practices are abysmal. See the Dublin Core standards. - Naming conventions similarly. "Report", "Resume", "Project", or "0.pdf" are names which should never be used. Describe author, content, and date, as a minimum, if possible.
• solarpunk 5y ago
  it appears techies have discovered zines?
• 6510 5y ago
  the url should end like /Deurbanising-the-Web.pdf so that hitting the safe button doesn't name the file document.pdf or 0.pdf Also this... https://lab6.com/0#%5B%7B%22num%22%3A1%2C%22gen%22%3A0%7D%2C%7B%22name%22%3A%22XYZ%22%7D%2C70.85%2C654.239%2C0%5D https://lab6.com/0#%5B%7B%22num%22%3A1%2C%22gen%22%3A0%7D%2C... eh?
• kerryoco 5y ago
  * PDFs are files. We must not lose sight of the fact that files are a basic freedom. This seems like the core belief of the article. And it's at odds with the nature of the web. In the beginning, the web was a network of devices transmitting files with addressable locations on the device, creating a more or less 1:1 relationship between the devices and the web - the devices WERE the web. But this inevitably faded as information wants to be... fast and it became easier to whip small data packets around describing state, not files. I agree with the Unixy belief - files are freedom. But trying to model the entire web on those files is fighting gravity. They're not going anywhere. They just have to travel through the Web Soup sometimes now. All the technologies enabling a global network of file sharing are still there, the author is just bemoaning today's lingua franca. (json?) And perhaps there is a fear that we will lose sight of "device-based computing" / file ownership. It has political overtones too... individualism vs collectivism. The web is a very interesting place to hash through those ideas in code before we hash through them in legislation.