Hacker News Reader

> The key difference between print systems and web tech is responsiveness.

True, but... we were very good at building unresponsive websites in the early 2000s. Can't we just return to tradition and disable a lot of the responsive behaviour that we've layered onto HTML with an off-the-shelf stylesheet? Hardcode some width properties, ya know? (This is not a rhetorical question, genuinely curious).

View on HN

You can trivially define a CSS stylesheet that eg. hides all the interactive elements like INPUTs and FORMs, or renders <A> tags like plain text.

But "H" in "HTML" is for "Hyper(text)", which really talks about the interactivity. And then you get a really bad language for typesetting that simply lacks a gazillion features of true typesetting systems like TeX or even Typst.

Then you might as well just use PDF.js and render the PDF in its entirety.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com