5 ms·

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

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.

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.