[oplaadpunt]

Yes, fiction works because the layout is simple, consisting of text, and maybe images?

Research papers are far more complex, and have established standards that aid quick reading and parsing. I absolutely don't want to deal with reflowing equations, reflowing figures, or whatever when publishing papers. Precise margins and column widths.

[periheli0n]

Yet, by far the vast majority of content produced today, technical or prose, is read on screens.

Responsive webdesign has been around for quite a while. I don’t see a reason, other than lack of effort/investment, why we shouldn’t be able to read technical papers on variable-width screens, in a non-paginated form.

Dealing with the technical challenges should not be the task of the author, but the publisher. And indeed, most publishers are on it.

What‘s missing is a standardised format that can be downloaded, annotated, re-shared like a PDF.

[bccdee]

I wish there were a convention for sharing whole websites. Even a zip file containing an index.html plus images, css, other pages, etc. would be fine if browsers just supported it.

[warkdarrior]

The SingleFile browser extension can export a webpage into one HTML with all images, fonts, etc that are needed embedded in the HTML.

[bccdee]

Yeah but that works through base64 data urls, which are clumsy. Epubs are zips of separate resources and that works great. We should have an equivalent for webpages and other similar documents—a digital-first competitor to pdfs. Or maybe just broader compatibility for epubs, such as first-class browser support.

[gildas]

You might prefer SingleFileZ, see https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFileZ