Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

I find it weird to post such piece in PDF, which is meant for fixed format like A4 paper. Web is consumed in different clients - PC, phones, smart TVs. PDF is antithesis of web.

View on HN

Most PDF-creation programs I've tried are quite inflexible. In particular, I've found few that support hyperlinks. For whatever reason. That's definitely the antithesis of the web.

I think it's to have that "research paper" effect.

The original intention of the web was to make hypertext documents available to people - PDF is just as valid of a format for this purpose as HTML is. Perhaps more inaccessible but certainly not antithetical to the web.

Hard agree.

The single biggest difference is in the text flow algorithm. In PDF it's fixed.

If PDFs feel slow or clunky, that's just a matter of software rendering and payload construction.

The web could benefit from additional text flow algorithms. We leaned into the "application" centric web, but there's so much more we could do for documents and reading.

Super semantic time!

PDF isn't (hyper)text. HTML (HyperTextMarkupLanguage) is. PDF is blob.

A PDF containing text is a text document, just not a plain UTF-8 or ASCII document. If it has hyperlinks, it is hypertext.

A PDF is, at best, an image (of a document).

    application/pdf

There's a reason that isn't

    text/pdf.

I've come to call it the "printable document format." Great for dead trees, sucks for screens.

It saddens me greatly that we live in a time where text documents are the "antithesis of the web"

pdf is still much better than 5 MB webpage full of JS, that is the real antithesis of web.

5 mb of javascript is decried here but in practice it doesn't hinder the reading experience for people the majority of time while PDFs do, even more so when reading on a phone.

As much as I disagree with publishing this as PDF, a page with fat JS which locks up my browser and sometimes my whole machine, as I just experienced earlier today, is much worse.

Anyone developing Web sites should occasionally use a 5-year-old low-spec machine for a day or two.

It does happen but it's comparatively rare to actually be hindered from reading an article because of too much js while almost every PDF is a pain to read on a phone, and to a lesser extent on a monitor. You've probably read thousands of other articles on js-heavy pages without having as much convenience/time wasted as navigating a single PDF would.

I understand how you would assume that, but that is not the case for me at all. I'm hindered by JS-heavy pages on a daily basis, to the point where I rarely click any links on HN anymore.

For example, twitter.com takes 40-50 seconds of lockup to even begin displaying content, after which it is still unusable.

PDF inconvenient, and I didn't read this one, but at least I could close it as soon as I decided not to read.

You are in the minority. For most people twitter does not take anywhere near that long to load and I'd wager there's more people using phones to read and even as their primary/only device than there are with a connection/machine like yours.

I'm all for lighter sites but I'd still bet that an article published as a PDF would cause more inconvenience overall than publishing it on a typical js-heavy site. Further, there are more workarounds to js-heavy sites (blocking some js, mobile versions, rss etc.) than there are to pdfs.

> You are in the minority.

This is true, perhaps.

> I'm all for lighter sites but I'd still bet that an article published as a PDF would cause more inconvenience overall than publishing it on a typical js-heavy site.

This feels to me like you're telling me my experience is not valid. Is it because I'm in the minority? Or because you have a different experience?

Do you know anyone who uses a 5-year-old device day-to-day, or have you ever tried?

It feels like you are denying that this experience even exists.

I'm not telling you your experience isn't valid. We are comparing two approaches and I'm saying that while both cause problems one affects more people. That doesn't take away the issues with heavy js, simply makes it a lesser evil in this comparison.

>Do you know anyone who uses a 5-year-old device day-to-day, or have you ever tried?

Sure, I occasionally use my old 8 year old laptop or 6 year old phone and with either of those the article that will inconvenience me the most on the front page today is this one.

I feel like we are mostly in agreement. I appreciate you sharing your experience, and keeping your older devices working and useful.

Aside from usability, PDF also has many other drawbacks, such as being binary and not human readable or editable.

Thank you for this chat!

I read PDFs on my phone just fine. Yes I have to turn my phone sideways and zoom content to fit page width but that's okay. Much better than having fat JS and Css and browser rendering engines in place just so the page can be "responsive". I don't understand why we don't feel positively dirty about the responsiveness monster we've created to solve a non existent problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com