Improving the tooling will make PDFs load faster and (possibly) be easier to navigate. (Unless they're JPEGs stitched together in a booklet, in which case they're pretty much hopeless from a navigation standpoint in any event.) It won't, however, address the core concern, which you touch on here:

> What I don't get is the suggestion that PDF should be replaced by HTML. The purposes of the two formats are basically orthogonal and replacing one with the other is doomed to failure. The author's argument seems more akin to "print-layout documents should be replaced by hypertext," and perhaps this is true in some cases, but it's definitely a different matter and one that the author's arguments don't really support that well.

I mostly agree with you:

I think the arguments support it well enough: PDFs are sized for print, laid out for print, and fundamentally do not flow. HTML, despite the best efforts of some, is still malleable enough you can have a single page which gracefully resizes itself to a range of screens, a minor technical miracle the march of UX progress still hasn't fully taken from us.

My response to the author is this:

PDF looks the same on the screen as it does on the page. That is its blessing. That is its curse. Some people absolutely demand that as a hard requirement, and will not brook anything which adapts to different environments. If they didn't have PDFs, they'd go back to making websites where all of the content is in a series of JPEG images scaled to look right on their screens. I've seen it happen. Therefore, replacing PDF with HTML is not socially viable. It doesn't solve the "soft" problem, which is a harder constraint than any technical problem.