No, the entire point of the article is to convince people to use PDF/A. Which I find comical since you have to go out of your way to check if a PDF is PDF/A compliant. If the web was run by PDF's, there's no reason why any big corporations would abide by those rules, and it'd be just as messy as HTML is today.
You've also been nerd sniped. TA goes on and on about surveillance capitalism and the attention economy. Weird, for an article that's supposedly convincing engineers of the merits of one file format over another.
Did you read beyond the "How did it come to this?" section? TA goes on and on about web standards and the need for PDF/A.
Edit: If the article _was_ all about surveillance capitalism, then it wouldn't be worth upvoting as actionable solutions are much more valuable than preaching to the choir.
If you don't think it's clear that the author's advocacy of PDF is a means to an end, subservient to their desire to dismantle surveillance capitalism and the duopoly that Google/Apple have on the web, I don't know where to go from here.
It's when you trick a technically-minded person into jumping down a rabbit hole of a technical problem/controversy. Here it's PDF vs. HTML, but other classic nerd snipes are UTF-8 vs. anything else, "fixing" election tech, etc.
But, again, the premise is not that "as a file format, PDF is better than HTML". The premise is: because HTML is two-way, it enables surveillance capitalism and allows bad actors to monopolize the attention economy. The author wrote it thus:
> Sure, you can write good HTML. I won’t argue with that. And if you’re writing good HTML, good for you. But HTML is a dual-use technology, the bad guys are dual-using it an awful lot, and I feel that the stone age still has a part to play in the progression of the information age.
The part where you engage with this is where you write:
> I'm sorry, the more I think about this the dumber I feel. The web is useful because it's 2-way. I am excited by the web because I can interact with other people. I come to hacker news to engage with thinkers, not to just read a published article from one single author. I want to read ad-hoc opinions and user submitted content. PDF web, really?
Which is interesting! Do you have thoughts on creating peer-to-peer systems that don't enable surveillance capitalism?
A key here is that it's easier to write good HTML docs than good PDF docs, and much harder to deal with the harmful aspects of PDF docs given present technology.
> Which is interesting! Do you have thoughts on creating peer-to-peer systems that don't enable surveillance capitalism?
I don't know about the other person's ideas, but decentralization plus better anonymization and pseudonimization, with always-on strongest-reasonably-posible encryption, seems like the direction to go.
> A key here is that it's easier to write good HTML docs than good PDF docs, and much harder to deal with the harmful aspects of PDF docs given present technology.
Oh, yeah I'm not on the PDF train. That's wild. I'm more of a Markdown or Gemtext advocate, or even LaTeX.
> I don't know about the other person's ideas, but decentralization plus better anonymization and pseudonimization, with always-on strongest-reasonably-posible encryption, seems like the direction to go.
Yeah, projects like IPFS (which you reference above) are working towards this, but JavaScript still works over IPFS. Plus, fingerprinting techniques are pretty bonkers. Most of it comes down to JS and various state you keep on your local machine (cookies, flash cookies, etc.), but I think you need that. How do you maintain a session with a peer without some kind of token/cookie?
> Do you have thoughts on creating peer-to-peer systems that don't enable surveillance capitalism?
Yes, it's call TOR. However, legislation is where we should start. Crippling/abandoning an incredibly useful technology which works very well just because it's often used nefariously seems to be a bit of an overreaction.
Until then, stop using social platforms, use an ad blocker, and use VPN if you really care about "surveillance capitalism".
