No, Pdf isn't appropriate for electronic documents, it is especially user-unfriendly.

What exactly do you have against HTML? (It's not like we have any better alternative...)

IMHO the .mhtml format should be resurrected.

EDIT: And the Pdf format can be abused as well. At least it's easy to block JavaScript on HTML, even selectively (uMatrix).

I expect to be able to use video in an electronic document, PDF readers don't seem to be even able to support MP4, much less the upcoming AV1 !

PDF is the last way I want to consume content, especially on a smaller device.

I want to read the content, so just give me the content, not a pretentious image of it. Just give me <p> and image tags. Basic data.

I don’t want your “document”.

I wrote a response to this a few months ago that others may be interested in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24258193

Largely I am baffled, because the end result seems worse in almost every way than the starting point of HTML.

As a visually impaired person please don't. I like being able to resize text and still have the document flow properly instead of endlessly scrolling back and forth.

It's a Tagged PDF so supports reflow or extraction into HTML or text formats.

I'm a big fan of pdf/a but it doesn't support reflow, not in any sense that users would want or mean. Reading your post on a phone is awful.

"User friendly". Yes, for you, the author. At the expense of everyone reading your blog. When considering this is a one to infinity relationship (i.e. write once read a million times), focusing on optimizing the "write once" at the expense of the million times it gets read, might just well... cause it to be read only 10 times instead.

I wouldn't even bother reading a PDF and I am on a desktop. I make some exception: Books & Papers, device manuals and legal documents & the like.

I would never read a blog in PDF, unless it's the last blog on earth.

Excellent article, and a compelling proposition! Thanks for sharing this.

I hate reading that on mobile device, as it doesn't support reflow.