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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

IMHO blogs are documents, and HTML is no longer designed for documents but web applications.

Blogs need to go back to document publishing formats. It doesn't get more user-friendly than 1. WYSIWYG word processor; 2. Save As PDF; 3. Dump the file on a web host.

I'm switching to PDF/A: https://lab6.com/0#page=2

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No, Pdf isn't appropriate for electronic documents, it is especially user-unfriendly.

What exactly do you have against HTML? (It's not like we have any better alternative...)

IMHO the .mhtml format should be resurrected.

EDIT: And the Pdf format can be abused as well. At least it's easy to block JavaScript on HTML, even selectively (uMatrix).

I expect to be able to use video in an electronic document, PDF readers don't seem to be even able to support MP4, much less the upcoming AV1 !

PDF is the last way I want to consume content, especially on a smaller device.

I want to read the content, so just give me the content, not a pretentious image of it. Just give me <p> and image tags. Basic data.

I don’t want your “document”.

I wrote a response to this a few months ago that others may be interested in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24258193

Largely I am baffled, because the end result seems worse in almost every way than the starting point of HTML.

As a visually impaired person please don't. I like being able to resize text and still have the document flow properly instead of endlessly scrolling back and forth.

It's a Tagged PDF so supports reflow or extraction into HTML or text formats.

I'm a big fan of pdf/a but it doesn't support reflow, not in any sense that users would want or mean. Reading your post on a phone is awful.

"User friendly". Yes, for you, the author. At the expense of everyone reading your blog. When considering this is a one to infinity relationship (i.e. write once read a million times), focusing on optimizing the "write once" at the expense of the million times it gets read, might just well... cause it to be read only 10 times instead.

I wouldn't even bother reading a PDF and I am on a desktop. I make some exception: Books & Papers, device manuals and legal documents & the like.

I would never read a blog in PDF, unless it's the last blog on earth.

Excellent article, and a compelling proposition! Thanks for sharing this.

I hate reading that on mobile device, as it doesn't support reflow.

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