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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

> It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages.

It is easy to criticize something when you don't look back at the historical context through which it emerged. It has plenty of advantages over HTML but they're easy to dismiss if you don't have a use case for them.

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> It has plenty of advantages over HTML but they're easy to dismiss if you don't have a use case for them.

Can you discuss some of the advantages? The only advantage that comes to mind is that Apple has built-in support for writing PDFs and that has a lot to do with Adobe rather than PDF being a better candidate.

PDF prints infinitely better than HTML, and it can be somewhat hardened against modification by average users.

If you think MSOffice users would prefer to output HTML over PDF, you don't live in the same corporate world I inhabit.

I work for US Federal courts, I can assure you html isn’t sufficient over PDF’s for court cases. Evidence are filed in pdfs. Documents (PDFs) need to be a historical archive, and the ability to modify would damage the credibility of those documents.

Yeah, but does Firefox need to solve the use-case of a court system? Also, tangentially the solution to guarantee "tamperproof" archiving is in cryptography and that's not a feature of PDF.

No, Firefox doesn’t need to support the use case of a court system. That’s not what GP is saying. All we’re establishing here is that PDF is a useful format, and Firefox is supporting it.

Also, cryptographic signatures do happen to be a feature of PDF.

Now that I read my comment I see the issue with it.

What I meant to say is that Firefox should focus on implementing cryptographic signing over HTML then. And not a PDF viewer on the web--in that, enabling cryptographic signatures isn't tied to the format PDF per se.

> ability to modify

How are PDFs any less modifiable than HTML other than requiring (widely available) specialized tools instead of a text editor?

Cryptographic signing is a core feature of PDF, but not HTML.

PDF's ubiquity is 100% that it printed the same (or close to same) on any postscript compatible printer. It's tech so old many in the industry ignore the reason it existed (and still exists). Every solution beyond PDF has also been either closed source (read Microsoft) or ignored. It's useful, that's why it exists. Yes, it's archaic, yes, it's hard to read for tech people, but for non tech people, it solves an issue that plagues the entire software industry: Standardization.

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