By Index & Index

I’m publishing this document in PDF because:

  • PDFs are self-contained and offlineable – you can archive them and be confident they will remain stable and readable in the future, with no external dependencies to manage. You can’t kill a PDF by shutting down an API.
  • PDFs are files. We must not lose sight of the fact that files are a basic freedom. In a world where information is increasingly locked up behind APIs, files represent control for the user. A file is a sequence of bytes, of a known length. It is completely under the control of the user. A vendor cannot change it sneakily. You can checksum it and

1 Not an original idea – such complaints are commonplace. Here’s one, and here’s another, and another, and another, and another.

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manage its integrity. You can sign it and manage its authenticity. You can back it up and distribute it easily. You can sneakernet it and samizdat it. You can parse it and convert it to another format. You can work with it offline. We have 60 years of tooling available to manage 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.
  • PDFs are discoverable. Search engines index them as easily as any other format.
  • PDFs are independent of browsers – but can still be read easily by most browsers.
  • PDFs and a PDF tool ecosystem exist today. No need for another ghost town GitHub repo with a promising README and v0.1 in progress. PoC||GTFO!
  • PDF is an open standard, which is freely available2, and stable. It has a version number and many interoperable implementations including free and open source readers and editors.
  • PDFs are part of the web, as much as HTML – they support hyperlinks and you can link to specific pages with URL fragments.
  • PDFs are page-oriented. This is another fundamental freedom – to know unambiguously which part of the document you are looking at. Compare to infinite-scroll HTML pages which are disorienting by design. This may sound trivial, but seriously: with infinite scrolling, you are fundamentally not in control of the reading experience. Let’s ignore the fact that most infinite scrolling implementations are janky. The problem is that you have no clear notion of when the document will end, whether you will be permitted to reach the end, whether the end will still be available by the time you get there, or what hurdles (adverts) lie in your path. It is harder to reference a section, to share it, to bookmark it, to download it, and to find it again. You are reliant on the site to inform you where you are and where you need to go next. Unsurprisingly, this disorientation is a feature, from the perspective of

2 Although it is a scandal that ISO want 198 Swiss Francs for a copy of the PDF 2.0 spec, ISO 32000-2:2017

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the content controller. A page is a physical unit of information just as the paragraph is a logical unit of information. HTML focuses on logical structure and leaves the physical structure to the browser, which ostensibly formats it for optimum viewing by the user, but in practice formats it for optimum “engagement” with the advertiser. Without pages, users are adrift.

PDF’s historical disadvantages are now either resolved or mitigated:

  • PDFs used to be large, and although they are still larger than equivalent HTML, they are still an order of magnitude smaller than the torrent of JavaScript sewage pumped down to your browser by most sites3.
  • PDFs used to be inaccessible, but now you can tag them.
  • PDFs used to be unreadable on small screens, but now you can reflow

    them.

  • PDFs used to be read-only, but now there are tools to edit them4, or dump their contents to other formats.
  • PDFs used to be best consumed as printed pages, but now there is an abundance of PDF tooling for viewing and manipulating them on screens of all sizes.

    How did it come to this?

    Some say the organic web is dead, but it is still out there. It’s out there in the same sense that the open countryside is still out there: local, boutique, and characterful, but gradually thinning in favour of a great migration away to the cities. Web denizens now spend their online lives in the immense arcologies of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, the walled gardens of app stores, and the walled fortresses of corporate networks. Basic infrastructure is gloriously taken care of by the City – no need to be concerned with what lies beneath the streets. It’s all just there waiting to serve eager customers. Plush furnishings and smooth highways. All you need to do is go when the light turns green and stop when the light turns red. You’ll never be lost because everywhere is a destination.

https://lab6.com/