I actually dislike HTML per se, but the only two benefits I see for PDFs in the general case are:
- In my experience, it's a little harder and rarer to make PDFs utterly incompatible with different means of viewing them, and it generally requires more overt (if perhaps slightly unintentional, at times) sadism to make that happen.
- PDFs can do some things HTML can't (easily, at least) with document design -- though those things are generally things that would be disallowed in our new "deurbanized" PDF-based web replacement.
Everything else that comes to mind goes the other way, including the fact that the viewing-mechanism incompatibility thing can be even worse with PDFs, even if it's more rare for that to happen at present, and if PDFs became the new standard for the web I'm pretty sure that relative rarity would evaporate anyway. Let's also not forget that HTML can also do some things PDFs can't (as easily, at least) do.
- In my experience, it's a little harder and rarer to make PDFs utterly incompatible with different means of viewing them, and it generally requires more overt (if perhaps slightly unintentional, at times) sadism to make that happen.
- PDFs can do some things HTML can't (easily, at least) with document design -- though those things are generally things that would be disallowed in our new "deurbanized" PDF-based web replacement.
Everything else that comes to mind goes the other way, including the fact that the viewing-mechanism incompatibility thing can be even worse with PDFs, even if it's more rare for that to happen at present, and if PDFs became the new standard for the web I'm pretty sure that relative rarity would evaporate anyway. Let's also not forget that HTML can also do some things PDFs can't (as easily, at least) do.