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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Being able to run JS in a PDF sounds scary to a lot of people, but I wouldn't throw that idea out entirely.

If you follow the work by Bret Victor & others on "explorable explanations"[0][1] and interactive scientific papers[2], you probably appreciate the need for a self-contained format for interactive documents. Could PDF be this? I don't know, I hear the spec is too scary. But I'd say we should have something like that.

[0] - https://explorabl.es/

[1] - http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/

[2] - http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt...

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Distill[1] is another example of interactive scientific papers (with a focus on machine learning).

But is there really a good reason to not just keep these in browser? I don't really know if there's much value in reading these locally. Maybe this would be a good fit for an electron app?

[1] https://distill.pub/

I would like HTML files to mostly replace pdf documents. However, they lack a couple things:

* A way to save back form data. I believe google is working on a js api to access local files (given a few conditions). * A way to bundle the html with every js script, ressource, css, etc, in one file, without making a huge mess.

If you had a tar.gz with an index.html inside, and the browser was to transparently allow r/w access to the archive contents from contained js scripts, this could solve a lot of use cases (heck, even "electron" apps could be replace by this). One exception being printed documents (postscript), at which pdf is quite good.

I'm in the same boat with browser-based vs electron apps (see my question [1]). I don't think PDF-based forms are an alternative to reactive web forms though, as they aren't dynamic enough. The sole purpose of PDF is page-oriented print, which html(+js) can't deliver.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773933

That behind us, there's also a matter of reliability and control. Services live much shorter than data they process; given today's trend, I wouldn't expect an online-only paper to be available after 5-10 years. Having a self-contained bundle would let me archive it independently, and would prevent any third parties from being able to interfere with my reading/exploration.

You can write self contained, single file .html documents just fine.

Not when you need images, and if you need to display 3D data you are required to actually serve textures over a server.

You can embed images in the HTML as well

Sure, if you resort to tricks like Base64 encoding in strings, that won't do for WebGL textures though.

The same idea made the web the disaster it is today.

No, it didn't.

The same idea made the web. Commercialization of the web was what caused the disaster.

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