Re: Announcing Project Mortar

On 03/10/2016 09:43, [email protected] wrote:
> On Sunday, 2 October 2016 23:27:51 UTC+1, Nicholas Nethercote  wrote:
>>> Although viewing PDFs in the browser is useful, PDFs are not a fundamental part of the web.
>
> Bit of a tangent... PDF's are important for the web, but they are very problematic (e.g. try reading an A4 formatted PDF on a small screen).
>
> If any developers implementing PDF in Firefox are on this list, I would like to discuss how we can move away from PDF's, possibly creating a simple alternative which allows for a HTML/CSS based document to replicate many of PDF's strengths:

Wouldn't this be a case of re-inventing the wheel? Multiple formats that
address this use case quite well (albeit from different perspectives)
already exist: XPS, Mobi, Epub, potentially HTML/CSS itself, as well as
the two web archive formats below.

> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1237990

This is 'Webpage ZIP as alternative to PDF' but two entrenched formats
already exist to do an equivalent: MHTML (RFC2557) and MAFF
<http://maf.mozdev.org/maff-specification.html>.

I accept that there is no existing format that is precisely the
equivalent of PDF but using HTML/CSS and Zips but, as above, there seem
to be so many existing formats (and, crucially, they are well-supported
formats) that cover what one might want to do with a theoretical new
format in this context that creating a new format and persuading people
to use it seems likely to be a wasted effort. It's risking XKCD 927
<http://www.xkcd.com/927/>.


-- 
Mark Rousell