> 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.
It kind of seems like you're describing IPFS, except with worse content addressing guarantees. The vast majority of your users will never check to see if a PDF's content actually match its content address.
> All of these simple-complex propositions about making some subset language or automating document flows are missing the point entirely.
Are they? It's really not that hard to build a self-contained HTML file, and to re-emphasize, signed PDFs and signed HTML files are about the same level of accessibility to most users. Web browsers don't really handle either, if you want those guarantees you need to use a protocol/technology with better support right from the start.
Also to be clear, despite the author's argument that PDFs can be self-contained, no browser guarantees that, and there's no way for me to tell if the PDF is self contained when I click on it in Firefox unless I download it and check it myself offline or in a viewer that guarantees it won't make network requests.
Nothing online that I'm aware of forces authors to use PDF/A, so when I download a PDF, I don't know what I'm getting. It's not actually the magical, re-hostable world that the author claims.
I'm not sure that people are missing the author's point so much as they're saying the author is making claims about the portability of PDFs that aren't necessarily accurate. Yes, it would be good to have better self-contained guarantees about some web-content, but I'm not sure PDFs actually supply any of those guarantees.
It kind of seems like you're describing IPFS, except with worse content addressing guarantees. The vast majority of your users will never check to see if a PDF's content actually match its content address.
> All of these simple-complex propositions about making some subset language or automating document flows are missing the point entirely.
Are they? It's really not that hard to build a self-contained HTML file, and to re-emphasize, signed PDFs and signed HTML files are about the same level of accessibility to most users. Web browsers don't really handle either, if you want those guarantees you need to use a protocol/technology with better support right from the start.
Also to be clear, despite the author's argument that PDFs can be self-contained, no browser guarantees that, and there's no way for me to tell if the PDF is self contained when I click on it in Firefox unless I download it and check it myself offline or in a viewer that guarantees it won't make network requests.
Nothing online that I'm aware of forces authors to use PDF/A, so when I download a PDF, I don't know what I'm getting. It's not actually the magical, re-hostable world that the author claims.
I'm not sure that people are missing the author's point so much as they're saying the author is making claims about the portability of PDFs that aren't necessarily accurate. Yes, it would be good to have better self-contained guarantees about some web-content, but I'm not sure PDFs actually supply any of those guarantees.