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Comment by cxr | Hacker News Reader

The author does identify a problem, and so you want to focus on that. That's fine. There is the issue of triviality, however.

The problem described is widely felt, and also widely discussed. We already know this stuff to be a problem. For the piece to be worthwhile, then, it should do something that is not present in the other instances where the topic has been raised. It should articulate (or at the very least exhibit, without necessarily articulating) a solution for us. It doesn't. A bad remedy to a genuine problem does not yield a solved problem.

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The article is called "Deurbanising the Web", and its thesis is:

- Publish in static file formats.

- Date and hash your work.

- Stop spying on your users.

HN is a discussion forum, not project planning software. Not everything has to "yield a solved problem". Are you really setting the bar at "design a technology stack for replacing HTML/CSS/JS"? That's way, way too high.

Those points can be trivially met with static HTML and something like IPFS, and you can still download HTML for local storage and viewing. You can even print to PDF if you really want to do so. Meanwhile, PDFs also allow dynamic files, don't require dating and hashing, and can be used to spy on users or deliver malware.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, and static file formats doesn't necessarily have to mean static document formatting when viewing -- unless you're using PDFs, which tends to break useful stuff like reflowing for paginated documents (one of the worst things about even simple PDFs).

You say that its thesis is (in part) to generally publish in static file formats, but that's not quite accurate. The piece specifically touts PDF/A as the best format and makes several arguments against the use of html/css. I agree that they're making a broader point than just "use pdf," but "use pdf" is definitely a large part of it.

ipfs solve this well.

The author brings a solution, it is to publish documents in PDF instead of HTML.

"A bad remedy to a genuine problem does not yield a solved problem."

Why do you feel PDFs are a bad remedy? PDFs are the usual way I absorb information.

PDF is a great way to publish documents. which is what the web originally was.

The web has become a bad remedy to some distributed software problems.

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