

Open for discussion: PDF as HTML-replacement - albertzeyer

While browsing with Chrome and displaying a few random PDFs with its very fast and nice built-in PDF-viewer, I had these thoughts:<p>* It looks so much cleaner and better than many HTML pages.<p>* It looks consistent and everywhere the same.<p>* It loads faster than a similar sized HTML.<p>* What about having PDF as a replacement for HTML?<p>* It also has support for hyperlinks.<p>* It lacks some dynamic elements.<p>* Not sure if something like HTTP POST is possible.<p>* Those things could be added though.<p>* Chromes built-in PDF-viewer may be a good starting point to implement this.<p>* If Google itself would do this and add such support in Chrome, chances are good that this spreads fast.
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colinsidoti
Why constrain ourselves to the proportions of physical paper if we're not
using physical paper as our medium? The current suite of technologies is much
more suited towards all viewing devices. Just in general, web technology has
come a very, very long way in the past 5 years in terms of CSS, JS, and even
Flash. We've nearly reached a point where web developers have agreed a
standard method of development. PDF was not developed for interactive web
development and all of their form features are noticeably afterthoughts. The
list goes on and on, switching from HTML to PDF just doesn't make sense.

