3 ms·

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 exi

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
- the_other 5y ago
  Thank you for this detailed response!!
account42 5y ago
> it even displays fine on devices like tablets and phones that did not even exist 20 years ago It would display perfectly if mobile browsers didn't have broken defaults (to work around broken websites) that you need to disable using <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">.

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

the_other 5y ago
Thank you for this detailed response!!

account42 5y ago

> it even displays fine on devices like tablets and phones that did not even exist 20 years ago It would display perfectly if mobile browsers didn't have broken defaults (to work around broken websites) that you need to disable using <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">.