(If you're using PDFs for precisely-scaled engineering drawings, I expect you're well aware of this and have a workflow that avoids scaling, but I see people trip over it all too often.)
Good for you, but that doesn't change that most of the uses of PDF on the web aren't for applications like that.
[0] http://www.throwcase.com/2014/12/21/that-five-monkeys-and-a-...
PDF format is perfectly capable of holding structured text and other machine-readable/accessibility data, alongside the print-ready representation. Ask the developers of document authoring tools (starting with MS Office) and the various PDF generation libraries why they don’t include all that data as standard.
One can argue the appropriateness of a print-derived format in a constantly fluid digital world, but it does what it was designed to do and does it pretty well, and it could provide a lot more if developers and users could be bothered to do it.
And yes, HTML is its own exercise in awfulness that is equally bad at everything. I’d rather set my feet on fire that propagate that horror further.
Honestly, what we really need is a 21st-century Donald Knuth. I only wish she’d hurry up.
However, it is possible to turn HTML5 into statement-of-record documents (Not PDF's),and make them immutable, encrypted and authenticated. A HTML5 document can have the features we need from PDF (immutability, encryption, authentication, pixel perfect print, etc.) while still allowing the resulting document to be interactive and responsive (work well mobile & web) in nature.
Effectively the best of both worlds.
Isn't "the purposes of the two formats are basically orthogonal" actually the entire point the article is making? Literally the first line of the summary:
> Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they’re still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them.
From the second paragraph:
> The [PDF] format is intended and optimized for print. It’s inherently inaccessible, unpleasant to read, and cumbersome to navigate online.
The bolded statement in the second paragraph that's clearly meant to be the One Important Thing to Take Away:
> Do not use PDFs to present digital content that could and should otherwise be a web page.
Your comment here is eloquent, but the article's argument is not "print-layout documents should be replaced by hypertext," it's "print-layout documents are a poor fit for reading on screen-layout devices." When you conclude:
> It's all a matter of opinion over whether you prefer print-format documents or hypertext, and that's going to be very application-specific.
Aren't you essentially restating the article's thesis?
I don't want to read an article online that's a PDF for largely the same reason that I don't want to print the web version of the same article rather than a PDF. It's generally going to be clunky. The print page size and dimensions are not going to be my screen/window size and dimensions. I certainly don't want to read two- or three-column text on screen, which may require zooming in and out and scrolling back and forth on the same "print" page. And God help me if I'm trying to do that on my phone or iPad mini.
The article isn't saying "PDF is terrible and nobody should ever use it"; it's saying "PDFs were meant for specific applications and in nearly all circumstances, online reading is not it."