> The guy outlines his whole case based on those exact points which are, as you have observed, technical quibbles and not a basis for abandoning HTML.
He's actually more of a social observation: it doesn't matter what the technology can do, what matters how how the developers of that technology actually use it.
People who use PDF almost never use 3D graphics and heavy dynamic JS, so PDFs almost always have many of the qualities he's seeking.
Web developers almost never inline anything, and do all kinds of things that are arguably deal-breakers except for a few lowest-common-denominator use cases.
> Under the hood it seems apparent to me that the real premise is an emotional one, not a technical one.
The premise is that the web has failed in important and clear ways, it's impossible to fix so we should give up, so many use cases should abandon it for something else, and PDFs are unexpectedly well suited for that.
On a related note, part of me wishes Java Applets never died. Getting rid of them seems to have caused the Web to turn into them, and maybe if they'd remained some kind of separation could have been maintained.
Turning PDFs into the replacement for HTML would change the incentives around PDF authoring, and PDFs would then acquire the same problems identified with HTML.
The solution to the identified problems is not to switch to PDFs. Stop reshuffling the chairs on the deck of your sinking ship, and start figuring out how to design, implement, and incentivize the use of, some means of conveyance other than iceberg-vulnerable ships.
> On a related note, part of me wishes Java Applets never died. Getting rid of them seems to have caused the Web to turn into them, and maybe if they'd remained some kind of separation could have been maintained.
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.
He's actually more of a social observation: it doesn't matter what the technology can do, what matters how how the developers of that technology actually use it.
People who use PDF almost never use 3D graphics and heavy dynamic JS, so PDFs almost always have many of the qualities he's seeking.
Web developers almost never inline anything, and do all kinds of things that are arguably deal-breakers except for a few lowest-common-denominator use cases.
> Under the hood it seems apparent to me that the real premise is an emotional one, not a technical one.
The premise is that the web has failed in important and clear ways, it's impossible to fix so we should give up, so many use cases should abandon it for something else, and PDFs are unexpectedly well suited for that.
On a related note, part of me wishes Java Applets never died. Getting rid of them seems to have caused the Web to turn into them, and maybe if they'd remained some kind of separation could have been maintained.