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

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.