This is not true. Ask a Lawyer, Accountant or a Journalist wading through govt pdfs.
The reasons cases and investigations take forever is the time spent manually reassembling related data residing in different orgs. The same data across all orgs will show up as 25 differently structured tables. This is changing slowly but putting public tabular data in pdfs has probably cost the economy billions.
Or you could says it has created a ton of jobs :)
I have policy and legal documents from 2005 in PDF/A that can be rendered identically in 2019, and likely in 2105. That isn't the case for HTML, Word or almost any non-plaintext format. If for no other reason than the US Federal Courts require use of PDF, the format will exist and be somewhat vibrant for many decades to come.
I can wholeheartedly will agree that Adobe Reader sucks, but the format solves lots of problems that are difficult to solve otherwise.
A heavily restricted subset of HTML to replace PDF as the 'archival' format would make the world so much better of a place.
Will HTML formatting on a 4K display will look the same as an 800x600 monitor?
Will all of the ancient display elements display the same? Will IE4 specific artifacts display?
Search works fine in PDF. Mobile is not optimal, but platforms optimized for mobile require different design considerations. Few webpages look or function identically on mobile.
The only use-case I can conceive for perfectly-reproducable layout if you are not a print publisher is in fields where it is convention to reference text by page+paragraph number; in those cases, the page number is actually semantic information so could quite trivially be encoded in the content of the document to maintain that referent.
> Search works fine in PDF.
Search works fine in PDFs that don't use hyphenation or which properly implement it, and when they don't it breaks silently in ways that are potentially disastrous.
> Mobile is not optimal, but platforms optimized for mobile require different design considerations.
And my point about mobile was you don't need to optimize for it.
>Few webpages look or function identically on mobile.
Again, it doesn't need to look identical. That is a falce requirement. There is no value in that. The only web pages that don't function on mobile are ones which have been optimized for desktop. We're not talking about general-purpose web pages here, we're talking about textual documents.
This is not some hypothetical scenario, BTW. The UK has been using HTML over PDF for public-facing documents for a couple years now, it seems to be working out for them[1].
1. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should...
Although it's rare to find them nowadays, this is false for pages with no CSS at all. By no CSS I mean not even the infamous proprietary viewport meta tag... which is a posteriori being made CSS. Access for instance the basically unstyled page [1] with a $1000+ smartphone of our day... and you're likely to find unreadably small font.
Now, you could argue [1] functions on mobile, but let's agree it's stretching the meaning of that term. But that's not the main point: HTML elements come and go (for instance MENU; find others in [2]), so it's clear that archival reliability is not a big priority.
We all agree that ideally the source should always be made available (mandated if tax payers' money is involved if you ask me), but that doesn't invalidate the value of a universal presentational format.
[1] http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/papers/files/simhobby-local....