[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.

[j-pb]

So you're telling me that writing vanilla html with images embedded as data links, is more difficult than writing TeX or LaTeX?

[kevin_thibedeau]

PDF does have JS and hyperlinks.