Let me quote an electrical engineer who thought me about norms: "Always use PDF because it comes accross more real, because it cannot be edited (!)".

This is the perception non-IT-people have of PDF in comparison to e.g. .docx or similar editable formats those people know.

Personally, I would like to see a pdf-like format with video/animations/gifs, possibly the ability to play with models and variables.

PDFs can already contain videos and JavaScript. But given the security problems, I consider it a feature of most non-Adobe PDF viewers to not support that.

Right, I hadn't thought about those issues, and it's impossible to expect that venues and conferences will be capable of vetting the documents without introducing inefficiencies.

Perhaps we should move to sandboxed webpages embedded within electron, where each paper is its own page?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!

I take that as an emphatic no.