[doubleunplussed]

A slight impediment to that is that ArXiv discards PDFs that have not been accessed in a while, and rebuilds them from TeX source if later accessed. The result may not have the same hash - I sometimes even see ArXiv PDFs with today's date in them despite being published a long time ago, because the author used the \today macro. So you would need reproducible builds for the hashes to be valid, or for ArXiv to no longer have the storage concerns thst lead them to this practice. Or you could hash the TeX I suppose.

[j-pb]

Yeah, you should hash the TeX. It's a pity really that PDF has become the dominant publication format, it's just so bad and non machine readable. It's absurd to me that scientific publications haven't switched over to HTML, I mean that format was invented for scientific publication...

[cameronbrown]

I think the consistency of PDF is why it's favoured. It's also completely self contained where HTML has severe issues with long term access.

[j-pb]

Could you elaborate on how you feel that html isn't self contained, and how there are issues with long term access?

[captn3m0]

References to third party websites that can break. HTML is a living spec, so browsers can decide to break things that work today (as happened with Marquee for eg).

Even if you disallow JS entirely, and stick with just HTML/CSS, it has enough warts to not look and behave consistently over time.

[j-pb]

A link could easily be a URN that identifies the target by its hash, all the protocols for that are already in place e.g. magnet links. PDF doesn't have JS and hyperlinking, so I guess all you'd need would be HTML, even ignoring CSS, which could be tailored to the reader, e.g. Latex style, troff style etc.

Vanilla html with images embedded as data URNs should be pretty darn portable for the forseeable future.

Heres the kicker, it's a text based protocol, and a dead simple one, eben if we should loose all browsers in the big browser war of 2033, its super easy to reverse engineer. PDF not so much.

[sjy]

A subset of HTML + CSS (+ ECMAScript?) could replace PDF for this purpose. However, is there a standard subset and familiar, understandable tools for working with it? In general, using the 'save as' function in a web browser won't produce a document that looks the same 10 years later. Rewriting the source document using a tool like wget can achieve this, but it doesn't always work (eg. what if the content was pulled in asynchronously?), and you need a computer expert to create and explain how the archived format relates to the live content. 'Save as PDF,' despite its technical inferiority, is easy and widely understood.

[kevin_thibedeau]

PDF does have JS and hyperlinks.

[9HZZRfNlpR]

HTML/CSS is extremely backwards compatible, modern browsers don't have problems of displaying the page differently.

How does pdf solve link rot problem? Pdf is good for print, it's consistant. But fails when display size other than big screen, especially e-ink displays that don't tend to be your standard A4.

[sjy]

PDFs don't solve link rot. But in HTML, it's conventional to rely on links for stylesheets and sometimes even content (images, asynchronous DOM elements), so link rot is a bigger problem.

[dekhn]

My thesis from 1995 is still online (tex to html): https://compbio.soe.ucsc.edu/papers/thesis_rafael/thesis.htm... however all the image links broke a decade or two ago.

[foota]

Imo tex isn't much more machine readable, depending on what you want to do. Reformatting or lossy conversion to plaintext? Sure. Determining semantics? Good luck.

[buboard]

That sounds like an overkill thing to do nowadays