In a sea of cynicism, I gotta say.. bravo. This genuinely put a smile on my face. It has a lot of problems, sure, but it's a creative use of the Web and would surely work for some use cases. It's certainly no worse than using Flash ever was.
It reminds me a bit of a "newsletter" I'm subscribed to called, ironically, "Not a Newsletter" (http://notanewsletter.com/). You get an email from the author each month and it just points to a Google Doc where he puts the actual content. Why's this good? The content can't set off any spam filters, he can edit the issue after it's "sent" if there are mistakes or broken links..
The content can be censored arbitrarily by google, and when you click on mobile web with the docs app installed, it logs your logged in google account identity (maybe for work?) with the view when it switches to the app.
If the author was concerned about getting censored by Google or feeding their data empire, they could set up a self-hosted Google Docs-like, like NextCloud.
The readers would still need to trust the author's not doing anything nefarious with their IP addresses, but I guess there's a degree of implicit trust when subscribing to a newsletter.
I would just put it on my own server. Are people really worried about clicking a private link and having their IP address logged? Just opening an email with a tracking pixel triggers that already, and you have to assume clicking a link will log your IP whether with Google or Constant Contact or any other mass email provider.
Google Docs are still files. It's just up to the author (or even the readers) to keep copies outside of Google's servers. Unless Lab6 owns their own servers, whoever is hosting these pdfs can delete them as well. At least, in both cases, static files are much easier to backup and copy than entire three-tier dynamic applications. And readers can keep their own copies separate from the original, which isn't possible with an application at all.
Yup. Another way to say it is Google will release a file format the day offline computing drops dead. It should probably amount to an antitrust case or at least a major class action claim at this point. That said, even with PDF specs it's freakin impossible to read/write that format in an intelligible way, if the person creating the document used even the barest amount of block alignment. Adobe started with an innovative notion about layout, but ended up making content extremely hard to parse, and actually tried to open source the engine. Google started with an idea of trapping everyone's data in a format they'd never make fully available, and then charging for the privilege of storing it.
It reminds me a bit of a "newsletter" I'm subscribed to called, ironically, "Not a Newsletter" (http://notanewsletter.com/). You get an email from the author each month and it just points to a Google Doc where he puts the actual content. Why's this good? The content can't set off any spam filters, he can edit the issue after it's "sent" if there are mistakes or broken links..