rehaanahmad
Regarding HTMl, our original site actually only supported HTML (because it was easier to build an annotator for an HTML page). the issue is that a good ~25% of these papers don't render properly which pisses off a lot of academics. Academics spend a lot of time making their papers look nice for PDF, so when someone comes along and refactors their entire paper in HTML, not everyone is a fan.
That being said, I do think long term HTML makes a lot of sense for papers. It allows researchers to embed videos and other content (think, robotics papers!). At some point we do want to incorporate HTML papers back into the site (perhaps as a toggle).
For some more context, we are a group of 3 students with a background in AI research, and this site was initially built as an internal tool to discuss ai papers at Stanford. We've been dealing with a lot of growing pains/infra issues over the past month that we are in the process of hashing out. From there we would love to make a more concerted effort to share this in areas outside of AI. Happy to hear your thoughts here, or more formally via [email protected].
I do want to highlight, our site has a team of reviewers/moderators and having folks from different subject areas is critical to making sure the site doesn't end up a cesspool, apply here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/11ve-4cL0axTDcqnHF66zX6greFV....