I guess I don’t really understand the point being made. Does it matter that much that saving a page create a single file in your hard drive? If you really want a static rendering of a site why not just print it to a PDF. Why does that have to dictate the file format you use for distribution? With PDFs you don’t have to worry about conversion but they are also comparatively larger over the wire.

> even that may not have the content you want to due to dynamic sites

But PDFs also don’t give you dynamic content. Nothing is stopping people from using HTML to serve static, JS-less content. In fact that’s what it was originally designed to do. All this web app stuff was bolted on afterwards, and it’s optional.

What do we accomplish by having some people switch over to PDFs? The people who don’t care about bloat will continue to not care about it. It’s not like thin content will become more discoverable or more common. It doesn’t really change incentives. The author says using PDFs makes it so you’re not tempted to add cruft to your sites but that’s not really a compelling argument.

Getting content creators to produce content without bloat is not really a technical problem. It’s a cultural and economic one. I don’t see how a file format addresses that.