"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 referenc

"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