I honestly can't believe all the praise for HTML and web on HN in the face of this awesome critique. I hugely appreciate the love for actual files.
>• PDFs are decentralised. You may have obtained this PDF from a website, or maybe not! Self-contained static files are liberating! They stand alone and are not dependent on being hosted by any particular web server or under any particular domain. You can publish to one host or to a thousand hosts or to none, and it maintains its identity through content-addressing, not through the blessing of a distributor.
This seems to have gotten lost in the offense everyone has taken over the choice to not use 'simple HTML', despite the document's clear reasoning that to do even that would embed the content deep in the 'urban web'. All of these simple-complex propositions about making some subset language or automating document flows are missing the point entirely.
>• PDFs are decentralised. You may have obtained this PDF from a website, or maybe not! Self-contained static files are liberating! They stand alone and are not dependent on being hosted by any particular web server or under any particular domain. You can publish to one host or to a thousand hosts or to none, and it maintains its identity through content-addressing, not through the blessing of a distributor.
This seems to have gotten lost in the offense everyone has taken over the choice to not use 'simple HTML', despite the document's clear reasoning that to do even that would embed the content deep in the 'urban web'. All of these simple-complex propositions about making some subset language or automating document flows are missing the point entirely.