Given the variety of agreements on international intellectual property law such as the Berne Convention, WCT, TRIPS pushed through multinational organizations like the WTO, the only country in the world with 0 copyright is the Marshall Islands (excluding audio-visual media regulated by the Unauthorized Copies of Recorded Materials Act, 1991). Even North Korea has life + 50 years.
Some countries decide to leave their copyright laws unenforced (or selectively enforced if they don't like you). Not much choice for people who don't agree with copyright law itself though.
Physical property is zero-sum. If someone else is driving your car, you can't drive it. If you copy my PDF, I still have my PDF and can use it exactly the same. I'm only deprived of a hypothetical profit I could have made by selling that PDF to you (if you would've paid for it).
Imagine I believe that depriving people of hypothetical profits is morally wrong. By the same logic, libraries are stealing from authors by depriving them of potential sales. Peaceful protesters are stealing from retail businesses by obstructing hypothetical sales. Municipal water suppliers are stealing from bottled water companies by depriving hypothetical sales.
My logic wouldn't have internal consistency with societal norms unless I accepted that creative production is somehow unique and special, and warrants special rules to protect hypothetical profits with the threat of lawyers and state-backed violence.
Still, let's assume I agree. There are many scenarios, illegal under intellectual property law, where the author/creator isn't deprived of anything, even a hypothetical profit. Consider that copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. For 70 years, the author isn't deprived of even hypothetical profit, because they're already dead.
maybe you rent, but renters DGAF about the local community the way that homeowners do.
home (property) taxes also fund a lot local services, schools, etc. you want prices higher and stable, and not dominated too heavily by mega-corps that will weasel out of paying said taxes.
In my opinion, whether or not a website uses JS is orthogonal to this (though, I would argue websites shouldn't need JS just to repeat some elements). The issue is web has changed from JS enhancing a structure defined by HTML to JS subsuming the role of the web entirely (see HTML-in-JS, CSS-in-JS). Perhaps the greatest issue is that people don't realise that this is an issue.
It's a useful paradigm for people making highly dynamic websites like Google Maps but the vast majority of websites are not Google Maps. Since 2011, browser vendors and standards bodies have expended an astronomical amount of time, effort and resources into designing and implementing the Web Components spec. The resources used to develop Web Components came at the expense of other features that could have improved the web. More than a decade later, adoption into non-Google websites is a rounding error.
Web Components are designed as a behavior (JS) first standard, not a structure (HTML) first standard. This is not the way many websites are designed, it's evident in the popularity of structure-first frameworks like Vue and htmx. You can't force a website into a web application shaped hole.
I think this is a good change. Even repeating some elements is an example of looping, a Turing behavior that should be left to JS. We're way past the point where some predefined markup can accommodate most sites. Even "brochureware" sites can be built and maintained easier with programmatic code rather than static definitions of page layouts and content.
I think the "purity" of HTML as a web language is a myth. HTML is an application of SGML, just like XML. It was designed to describe documents, not programs. Most people today would benefit from building a web application rather than a document.
I think you're right. It's a good change for people who want to build web applications. Maybe that's the right thing for future development ease. I feel it's a shame though, the de-emphasis of web documents leads to more content being centralized on large platforms like Facebook, Medium, etc. People at the small scale don't benefit as much from programmability. It leads to a less open and inclusive web.
All too often being 'mobile first' means being desktop last. It feels like a betrayal when UX becomes a zero sum tradeoff between new users and the enthusiast users who built the platform and community to be what it is. User research metrics will favor the new users every time because inexperienced users tend to be the majority. Eventually, the enthusiast users leave, causing many to wonder why the original culture and appeal of a website disappeared.
I'm very confused with the PDF appreciation comments. I have to read lots of PDF textbooks and reference documents for school and the experience is grating, especially trying to navigate a document with upwards of 1000 pages on the Chrome PDF reader or Adobe Acrobat on a laptop. Trying to manipulate a tiny scrollbar with a laptop touchpad is very frustrating and using gesture scrolling is tedious for a large document when you have to flip around to various pages. Perhaps I've been doing something wrong, any thoughts?
PDFs look and are made to feel like actual books. I see that as the primary reason for people being comfortable with PDFs. Even if their readers are buggy.
Consider the alternatives.
HTML, too much re-rendering and re-formatting.
Word - Oh No. Not in a million lives. Have you seen the atrocity that is the "reading mode" in Word?
Epub / Mobi / Etc - I have never come across good readers.
For what its worth, PDFs are great for reading on larger screens like iPads. I read them on my mobile too, but that's not good for long reads.
The price is pretty reasonable up to about 7-8", and not too high to 10".
I splurged for 13" as I read a lot and often low-quality scans of small, three-column print.
The pixel density of an ebook reader (200-300 DPI) is far higher than even Retina displays. Monocrome/greyscale gives higher resolution as well (the three-elements-per-pel aspect of colour displays means you're always left with about 30% the effective resolution, though subpixel aliasing helps a lot).
Portrait will display a single page well (laptop displays suck for reading text), and for larger devices or larger-print materials, you can often manage a two-page-up display.
Well imagine reading (and searching) in an HTML document of 1000 pages upward (I certainly would not want to scroll through it) and you realise why people who read longer texts like PDFs. It seems like you have issues with your reader, but there is lots of other readers which render documents very fast.
Feels very much like a channeling of Churchill's 'Democracy is the worst form of government' ditty, except as applied to HTML and PDF. PDF is horrible. But it's not 'as horrible' as HTML (with the rather loomingly large caveat that this is has very little to do with the formats and everything to do with what your average HTML dev ends up making, and only applies to the job of reading significant chunks of in-depth materials).
As a format, yes, what the fuck is everybody talking about? PDF is a disaster and should be killed off, HTML is great.
Given the variety of agreements on international intellectual property law such as the Berne Convention, WCT, TRIPS pushed through multinational organizations like the WTO, the only country in the world with 0 copyright is the Marshall Islands (excluding audio-visual media regulated by the Unauthorized Copies of Recorded Materials Act, 1991). Even North Korea has life + 50 years.
Some countries decide to leave their copyright laws unenforced (or selectively enforced if they don't like you). Not much choice for people who don't agree with copyright law itself though.