Like the authors, I find that content published as a PDF is often extremely verbose, almost like the authors are paid by the page.
Government reports, or those prepared by consultants, are often the worst offenders.
Government reports, or those prepared by consultants, are often the worst offenders.
Didn't anyone notice that it's basically impossible to save an html page today and have it load and render correctly and offline tomorrow?
There are tools that try to fetch those links and update the HTML to point to the local copy. But those tools can only go so far. JS is allowed to fetch new files dynamically, and there's no reliable way to look at a piece of code and automatically figure out what it's going to fetch when you run it.
You've diverged from the context and are no longer doing an apples-to-apples comparison. The things you're describing are all opt-in and amount to having to deal with an adversarial input. There's nothing inherent to the medium that requires those things.
In other words, a person publishing a PDF is already abstaining from certain things. (Namely, the sorts of things you're bringing up that would make for a pathological case.) If the person who publishes a PDF does a straightforward translation into a web page, then you end up with something that doesn't exhibit any of the downsides you're discussing.
If I had an idea and wanted to communicate it, then I did so by recorded video, by live video, by blog post, by Twitter thread, and by HN comment, the same idea would be presented in very different ways.
In the same way, a writer who publishes something by HTML (blog post, etc.) will produce a very different document than if they intend to publish it by PDF (ebook, etc.). They tailor their message to the constraint and expectations of the medium.
We put all sorts of rubbish in the report to make sure it made a "thunk" sound when we handed it in. It was nearly 300 pages when it should have been 90.
The problem is, plenty will judge a report on its thickness. "It is thick, so it must be comprehensive." What percent of government reports are read cover to cover and what percentage are just ctrl+f through?
Perhaps it is better to be comprehensive in government reports than concise, to accommodate a variety of readers who want to drill into different aspects of the report.
(Of course, a PDF may not be the best structure for this! A well-formatted HTML reference with appropriate hyperlinks may be much more useful.)
http://media.metro.net/about_us/vision-2028/report_metro_vis...
I see it as the pendant of the "younger generations can't read anymore" critic, where lenghty, rambling and diluted prose is becoming harder and harder to parse and focus on.
On the other side page load speed and attention grabbing metrics are thoroughly studied for web pages and people value terseness, to the point of loathing click baits and endless listicles.
Even if verbose, those PDF are often still the only place where the relevant substance is together. The websites referring to them then cherry pick from it. I spend a whole lot of time sifting trough goverment PDFs over the last couple months because it was the only way to get to the information I needed.
It would be much easier if the content were available in different formats.