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by MayeulC 2746 days ago
I would like HTML files to mostly replace pdf documents. However, they lack a couple things:

* A way to save back form data. I believe google is working on a js api to access local files (given a few conditions). * A way to bundle the html with every js script, ressource, css, etc, in one file, without making a huge mess.

If you had a tar.gz with an index.html inside, and the browser was to transparently allow r/w access to the archive contents from contained js scripts, this could solve a lot of use cases (heck, even "electron" apps could be replace by this). One exception being printed documents (postscript), at which pdf is quite good.

1 comments

I'm in the same boat with browser-based vs electron apps (see my question [1]). I don't think PDF-based forms are an alternative to reactive web forms though, as they aren't dynamic enough. The sole purpose of PDF is page-oriented print, which html(+js) can't deliver.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773933