I’ll agree that “most people [...] don’t even bother looking at the data [...]”—I, in particular, am not sufficiently invested in this argument to go to the inconvenience of reading a PDF. The effect of modifiers “this site” and “Soviet Russia” I have no interesting opinion on.
(By the way: horrible format for Internet content. If you can read this, please don’t upload your information to the Internet in PDF format. Make an HTML file.)
I, in particular, am not sufficiently invested in this argument to go to the inconvenience of reading a PDF.
Here’s an HTMLized version, albeit one that still looks like a PDF (though one you don’t have to download, doesn’t use any browser plugins, and can’t give you a virus).
We have to learn to live with PDFs as virtually all research is formatted as PDFs. Sane (single column portrait-only) PDFs like the linked paper are not particularly worse than constant-width websites. You are exaggerating the inconvenience.
The problem are PDFs which do things that make sense only on paper—like double column / alternating portrait-landscape—these are really really bad for reading on screen. But—what stops PDF readers from having some hacks to make them bearable? I cannot think of any reason. And it would definitely be easier to hack PDF readers than to make all researchers and all research journals in the world switch to HTML.
Related problem of tables being in appendix as opposed to floating seems harder to solve, but it’s nowhere near as bad as double columns PDFs.
(1) is genuine (but then many websites assume constant width, so it’s not PDF-exclusive issue), but (2) and (3) sound totally made-up to me. Browsers have had far more security vulnerabilities, and use far more CPU/memory than PDF readers.
Indeed, I’ve been infected by PDF-based viruses more than once. Updating Acrobat and turning off JavaScript in PDFs isn’t enough to keep you safe, either; I finally added NoScript to Firefox in order to prevent any PDFs from being displayed without an extra enabling click, so that only PDFs I trust are ever downloaded.
Of course, this has little relevance to scientific papers: the PDFs that you need to worry about are the ones that you never intended to download in the first place, that are downloaded in the background via JavaScript or an iframe embedded in an ad on a random webpage. (I once caught one from Kaj Sotala’s LiveJournal page, for example… just visiting the page was enough to infect my machine.)
Nearly echoing FAWS, a browser alone will have less CPU/memory usage than a browser+a PDF reader. More importantly, there is no delay to load the PDF viewer when visiting an HTML page, where there is for PDFs.
I’ll agree that “most people [...] don’t even bother looking at the data [...]”—I, in particular, am not sufficiently invested in this argument to go to the inconvenience of reading a PDF. The effect of modifiers “this site” and “Soviet Russia” I have no interesting opinion on.
(By the way: horrible format for Internet content. If you can read this, please don’t upload your information to the Internet in PDF format. Make an HTML file.)
Here’s an HTMLized version, albeit one that still looks like a PDF (though one you don’t have to download, doesn’t use any browser plugins, and can’t give you a virus).
We have to learn to live with PDFs as virtually all research is formatted as PDFs. Sane (single column portrait-only) PDFs like the linked paper are not particularly worse than constant-width websites. You are exaggerating the inconvenience.
The problem are PDFs which do things that make sense only on paper—like double column / alternating portrait-landscape—these are really really bad for reading on screen. But—what stops PDF readers from having some hacks to make them bearable? I cannot think of any reason. And it would definitely be easier to hack PDF readers than to make all researchers and all research journals in the world switch to HTML.
Related problem of tables being in appendix as opposed to floating seems harder to solve, but it’s nowhere near as bad as double columns PDFs.
The biggest three problems with PDFs as a format for Internet content are:
The text display does not adapt to your window.
Viewing the content requires running additional processes, adding CPU and memory usage.
PDF viruses.
You pointed out (1), but (2) is no less annoying to me personally. That said: yeah, I got no control over this.
(1) is genuine (but then many websites assume constant width, so it’s not PDF-exclusive issue), but (2) and (3) sound totally made-up to me. Browsers have had far more security vulnerabilities, and use far more CPU/memory than PDF readers.
PDF viruses exist.
Indeed, I’ve been infected by PDF-based viruses more than once. Updating Acrobat and turning off JavaScript in PDFs isn’t enough to keep you safe, either; I finally added NoScript to Firefox in order to prevent any PDFs from being displayed without an extra enabling click, so that only PDFs I trust are ever downloaded.
Of course, this has little relevance to scientific papers: the PDFs that you need to worry about are the ones that you never intended to download in the first place, that are downloaded in the background via JavaScript or an iframe embedded in an ad on a random webpage. (I once caught one from Kaj Sotala’s LiveJournal page, for example… just visiting the page was enough to infect my machine.)
But a browser alone will have fewer vulnerabilities (and probably use less resources) than a browser + a PDF reader.
Nearly echoing FAWS, a browser alone will have less CPU/memory usage than a browser+a PDF reader. More importantly, there is no delay to load the PDF viewer when visiting an HTML page, where there is for PDFs.