> PDFs are unexpectedly well suited for that. Not so surprising, really: the PDF standard evolved in parallel with Adobe's Flash between 2005 and 2010, which w

> PDFs are unexpectedly well suited for that. Not so surprising, really: the PDF standard evolved in parallel with Adobe's Flash between 2005 and 2010, which was then the key technology in Adobe's effort to keep a strategic toehold on the web. If Flash had not been a security clusterfuck, it might still be around. The PDF standard was always meant to be a complementary standard, and Adobe's attempted successor technologies have followed an even closer technological path. The PDF standard has benefited from the fact that, unlike the W3C and WHATWG, surveillance capitalists have not been in the driving seat of its standardisation effort. Adobe's interests are not identical to those of the public, but they are not as essentially adversarial to them as the web standards bodies have been.