[apotheon]

Why does it seem like almost everyone doesn't realize that PDFs can easily be made to support all the horrors we see in HTML? No, it's fucking well not impossible -- or even notably difficult -- to jam some malicious dynamic code into a PDF. The only reason a period of widespread fear about PDF viruses hasn't developed as it has for websites spreading malicious code is the fact that websites got much more widely adopted. PDFs have been used as malicious code vectors before, and replacing HTML with PDFs would only result in PDFs being the new common vector for the same problem, with at least the same scale and intensity.

This only seems like a solution if you don't know what PDFs can do -- and, by the way, sometimes pagination is bad, especially static (non-reflow) pagination.

EDIT:

Let's make this clearer.

You can actually embed an entire JavaScript application in a PDF. Tell me again how PDFs somehow prevent the problem of dynamic pages on the web. All using PDFs instead of HTML pages would do is wrap the horrors of the web in forms that are generally more hostile to various viewing contexts for the less harmful use cases (e.g. static pages suddenly being harder to read in some contexts with PDFs than with HTML pages).