One publisher’s attempt to roll the internet back to a more innocent time
In January, an online publisher launched a website called Lab 6 that serves its content as a PDF to protest the state of the modern web, and has caused quite a stir. There’s nothing novel about posting PDFs to the web, but doing so as a protest against web technology is akin to taking a stand in the tabs-spaces debate – PDFs have long been a polarizing topic. Since then, two more issues of Lab 6 have been published, prompting disagreement among other web developers about the wisdom of this approach. The author, who asked to be identified simply as «James» in an email exchange with The Register, justified use of the PDF format as an attempt to push back against modern web technology. «PDF has many shortcomings,» he wrote in his initial issue. «But in its cold, immutable fixity, it stands in opposition to the mercenary, dynamic web of rubbish.» His post cites the toxic effect of advertising on the web, complaining about how search engine optimization has led to the generation of «megabytes of adverts, distractions, upsells, misdirections, invitations to sign up to newsletters, cookie warnings, [and] GDPR warnings.» It rails against the mutability of web pages, updated without notice in an attempt to keep the attention of search engines. It laments the tracking and monitoring scripts that litter websites. And it decries the capture of the web standards community by browser vendors. James, in short, rejects the way the web has evolved from a document-centric platform to an application-centric system. His solution is to publish files as PDF/A, «which forbids interactive content (normal PDFs can contain JavaScript!) and ensures your PDFs are absolutely self-contained, even embedding the fonts.» Maximiliano Firtman, a mobile and web developer and author, dismissed the cri de coeur as noise. «PDF Is not a format suited to share in different formats and diverse devices,» he told The Register. «It’s a format created for printing. So it’s like using a boat to drive across a street.» «There are much better choices, starting with just HTML with no external resources, epub, [or] markdown,» he said.
