Screen size-adaptability and reflow remains a problem. It would be better to fix that on the PDF end than to move those uses over to inferior web technologies.
When you say "a multi-hundred page PDF loads in a blink of an eye compared to a advertising tracker-loaded web page", consider why that is. The basic reason is that every page in PDF can be rendered individually. (In fact, the top-level grouping in PDF is the physical page instead of the semantic model of HTML.) This is only possible because PDF has no layout! When you introduce client-side layout, the client must lay out every page to render any of them, because the locations of page breaks depend on characteristics of the client device, creating a sequential dependency. If you were to somehow add layout to PDF, the sequential dependency would be there too; there's nothing magical about PDF that would prevent it from inheriting the problems of HTML.
Finally, PDF does have animations and scripting (with multiple JavaScript engines). In fact, it even has 3D (old-school VRML-style 3D, not the flexible immediate-mode GPU APIs browsers have). You'd be amazed how bloated PDF is!
PDF is an atrociously bad format, and I don't know what "multi-hundred page PDF loads in the blink of an eye" for you but even a 100 blank page PDF takes nearly a second to fully load on my beefy rig (I did the test a few months back to prove a point). [Edit: Other commenters made the clarification below, but single page render time is not the same as document render time]
Clearly extracting text from a PDF is nearly as difficult as extracting it from a photo. Digitally extracting information from PDFs in general is awful, which makes the format awful for the various things it's used for.
Not to mention that many uninformed users today still install the garbage / malware PDF readers such as Acrobat because they don't know any better.
Sure. I agree we shouldn’t replace interactive web apps with PDF.
The manual for PGF/TikZ [1] is a huge PDF I frequently open. It's more than 1300 pages and has lots of graphics. It opens and navigates in the blink of an eye on my 3 year old laptop (with the Okular reader). PDFs aren't perfect, but they sure feel spiffy compared to modern webpages.
I do agree with some of the article's complaints, but not this one.
[1] http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf
I will take the last part back, if someone can prove that I'm wrong about Word and PDF documents.
I wouldn't know – most PDFs I consume are generated by some variant of TeX. I gave a random 300-page datasheet I have lying around a go. It says it was made with Acrobat Distiller and "C2 Rendition". Feels just as spiffy as the PGF/TikZ manual.
HTML is progressively rendered by default. This has been a feature since Netscape 1.0! It is only if you use certain types of layout this is not possible. For example an adaptive table have to be fully loaded before the width of the columns can be calculated.
I rest my case
You can see it mentioned in the v1.4 spec at https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/pd... [follow the link from the contents].
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24035955
> No auto-play animations, no animations at all, no bizarre hijacking of scrolling
HackerNews commits neither of these sins. They aren't universal to the modern web, even if they're annoyingly prevalent. Given sufficient incompetence, both PDFs and websites can be bloated monstrosities.
I've never needed an ad blocker for a PDF. But I also don't have a good pdf reader for all of my devices.
Please remember that PDFs are absolutely capable of running code and do to deploy the advertising / tracking you listed as an issue with webpages.
If you are part of Adobe's premier advertising / tracking club (whatever it's called), and the user is viewing with Acrobat, you can see what people printed, where they highlighted, how long they stayed on a page, where they accessed, etc etc.
That's more of a problem with Adobe than PDF itself (never use Acrobat!), but that's hardly a rare theme when it comes to Adobe.
As annoying and obnoxious as animations and scrolljacking are, I prefer them to things like embedded viruses and SMB attacks that PDFs with embedded JS will happily run. https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/malicious-pdfs-revealing-te...