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Comment by untilHellbanned | Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna only add a troll comment and downvote me if you will, but PDFs break the web. That most academic publishers use PDF drives me crazy!! Why did we allow this to happen?

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I favor PDFs because they are in form of self contained concentrated knowledge.

I can save them, print them, read them on e-book and they play nice and they do not have unnecessary elements like menus or side panels or what ever.

The same can not be said about a web page. If nice printing option is not provided then it is normally near impossible to print correctly, if I save them, it is not sure that they would display correctly years later, if I do not save them, I could not be sure I could actually access the information years later.

Hmmm, This sounds like a standard whose time has come. Web pages that easily transform to a nice printable form, or perhaps multiple transforms. Occasionally I will be on a web page that has a "print format" option, but most of them suck. Now, How to monetize??? First thought is to be one of the new open science publishing platforms funded by donations and appropriate advertising.

I think the only way for everyone to get what they really want is to separate the "view" from the data. You can pack a lot of metadata, links, binary data (pictures) into a standardized and compressed format, then you can allow all the various mediums (web, desktop view, in-app text only, in-app pictures only, etc.) to create their own support/plugins for accessing that data package. Ship one package, view everywhere. And the plugins can be made for that medium safely from scratch. They can even simplify/allow/disallow certain categories of info as needed (allow text, disable links, don't view pictures) so that the data morphs to the needs of the medium/plugin.

addendum: I would add that mediums are usually just incidental and necessary means to get to content. Why force everyone to adopt a medium (adobe binaries) to get to the real focus? The content? Instead, just package the content, and people are great and finding their own paths to it via plugins if the interface and code is open and standardized.

I went on a google quest about this topic. Mapping my way through postscript, file encoding, pdf, xml, json. I eventually found my way onto a format that was right under my nose all along that kind of does all this. epub! Can extract to plain text, web, pdf, view natively, it's comprised of layers that you can use or not use, etc. Submitted it as it's own topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563472

Inertia. But academia is steadily moving towards more diverse presentation formats. Check out JOVE - http://www.jove.com/

(goes to jove.com)

(clicks one of the videos that sound interesting. start hearing about stem cell marker something-or-something)

(popup! "please register to continue watching")

No thanks. I'll take my pdf.

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