Re:Deurbanising the Web [pdf]
by tablespoon on Monday July 19, 2021 @12:02PM
(#27884095)
> This is news to me. I'm not sure that I buy it. PDFs have always been a pain in the ass to work with in my opinion. Maybe there are tools, but in my experience they aren't very good.
> In general, we know that HTML is going to be much more compact (and compressible!) than PDF and that's the biggest advantage I see on a web where bandwidth still matters. Another downside shows itself by trying to copy and pasting the above quote: PDF formatting seems to be weird.
PDF is a display format. I once worked on a project parallel to a guy who was parsing PDF to extract text content. IIRC, Text in PDFs is stored in a way that works fine for printing/rendering but not so well for manipulation (e.g. it's a bunch of commands to render line Z at position X,Y with font W). Those commands don't have to be in reading order, nor do they have the semantic meaning you can get from markup like HTML (e.g. superscript can just be nothing more than a different line rendered with a smaller font).
IMHO, PDF is actually less optimal than HTML for what this guy is advocating, except that it's those precisely those limitations that have prevented PDF from becoming the mess than Web HTML has. Though, that's probably in large part because the bloaters have been too distracted by the easier-target that is HTML to bother.
> In general, we know that HTML is going to be much more compact (and compressible!) than PDF and that's the biggest advantage I see on a web where bandwidth still matters. Another downside shows itself by trying to copy and pasting the above quote: PDF formatting seems to be weird.
PDF is a display format. I once worked on a project parallel to a guy who was parsing PDF to extract text content. IIRC, Text in PDFs is stored in a way that works fine for printing/rendering but not so well for manipulation (e.g. it's a bunch of commands to render line Z at position X,Y with font W). Those commands don't have to be in reading order, nor do they have the semantic meaning you can get from markup like HTML (e.g. superscript can just be nothing more than a different line rendered with a smaller font).
IMHO, PDF is actually less optimal than HTML for what this guy is advocating, except that it's those precisely those limitations that have prevented PDF from becoming the mess than Web HTML has. Though, that's probably in large part because the bloaters have been too distracted by the easier-target that is HTML to bother.