Re: PDF alternative (was Announcing Project Mortar)

Hi Mark,

While wdoc could archive web pages, the primary focus for me is reports, white papers, manuals, invoices, contracts, bank statements, etc.

As in, where a system/website needs to generate a document for people to read/save/email/print/etc.

Normally these are PDF's, but this is not ideal for end users (see previous email), and they are very difficult to create, with many developers choosing to create a HTML document first, and then passing it through one of the many HTML to PDF convertors (which strip all of the semantics, and typically do a poor job of rendering with CSS)[1].



As to your comments...

Windows Search, if it gets implemented in MS Edge [2], then Microsoft can easily index the content as well, where it would be almost identical to indexing docx files (which is a fairly complex XML file within a ZIP).

I'll try to look at WebExtension, or a general Firefox extension; unfortunately time is a little tight at the moment (due to paying work, such as hacking DOMPDF to generate a PDF in a certain way).

With archiving web pages, I might have to follow up on that in another email if anyone is interested, but you are right, this is a difficult thing to do, and will only be a bit better than the current solutions.

Anyway, thanks for the reply (don't worry about the delay), and for taking your time to read through the proposal.

Craig




[1] HTML to PDF convertors:

https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf
http://wkhtmltopdf.org/
https://www.google.com/?q=html+to+pdf

The Google search really demonstrates the number of "solutions".


[2] https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-developer/suggestions/11443002-webpage-zip-as-alternative-to-pdf



On Thursday, 13 October 2016 23:41:29 UTC+1, Mark Rousell  wrote:
> Craig,
> 
> First of all I apologise for taking ten days to reply!
> 
> On 03/10/2016 17:48, [email protected] wrote:
> > Hi Mark,
> >
> > I also worry about a "XKCD 927", and I spent a lot of time evaluating each of the existing formats because of that.
> >
> > Overall, none of them address the security, accessibility, or the ease of which the documents can be created/distributed.
> >
> > And while I did discuss this with the W3C a while ago, they were too focused on creating their own "new standards" (e.g. PWP), all of which have their uses, but didn't actually address the problems in PDF.
> >
> > I did also had an interesting discussion with someone at Adobe (under NDA), and they are looking at something very similar to this (but also more complicated).
> >
> > The justification about this file format is at the following URL:
> >
> > https://github.com/craigfrancis/wdoc
> 
> I accept that no existing format addresses the exact use case that you
> have in mind for wdoc, especially taking into consideration the specific
> drawbacks that you list of other formats in this context. I also
> appreciate that the format you propose has the advantage of relative
> simplicity and that most web browsers or mail clients could probably
> fairly easily be updated to support it.
> 
> One complication would be choosing how wdoc would archive web pages that
> make heavy use of Javascript for dynamically placing content. Such pages
> often cause print-to-PDF/save-as-PDF and save-as-MHT extensions great
> difficulty: The saved result is often quite dissimilar to the original,
> dynamically-generated page. As far as I can see, the wdoc format would
> have the same difficulty since, if I understand correctly, it would want
> to exclude the Javascript from the saved version of the page (or at
> least prevent the Javascript from requesting data from outside the wdoc
> file). Unless I'm missing something, there'd be no easy solution to this.
> 
> Despite the possible issue with saving faithful renderings of
> Javascript-heavy web pages, I would probably use the wdoc format if the
> support was there. I already use print-to-PDF print drivers and the
> UnMHT extension to save archives of web pages and I can tolerate the
> Javascript-related rendering issues that these experience, so such
> problems should not put me off using wdoc.
> 
> Personally, my main concern in terms of "support" would be the existence
> of an IFilter
> <https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb331575(v=vs.85).aspx#adding_new_file_format>
> for the wdoc format so that it could be properly indexed (both content
> and metadata) in the Windows Search system. Both PDFs and MHT files are
> automatically indexed (both text and metadata) by Window Search.
> 
> Good luck with gaining mindshare for the wdoc format. Although it seems
> as if it should be relatively simple to implement, I think that its use
> case is similar enough to other pre-existing formats to cause people to
> reject it to begin with, as I originally did.
> 
> If you could write a proof of concept Firefox extension then perhaps
> that would help a lot. (It might even be possible to do it in the new
> WebExtension system).
> 
> -- 
> Mark Rousell