We've had full page documents as PDFs for a long long time now. This isn't new. It's just someone wanting to be fancy/trendy/whatevs without consideration that people use the web in ways other than the designers do.
I’m thinking about it similar to how American law enforcement is required to store digital evidence, in particular the requirement that it’s “unmodified”. Per my understanding, that would disqualify, e.g., a .jpg that was converted to a .png from being submitted as evidence.
Obviously a journalist isn’t law enforcement but a good one will still gather and retain evidence. They also don’t necessarily need to be as strict as prosecutors but it’s a good standard to try to emulate. To that end, a PDF wouldn’t do.
I wouldn’t doubt that these assumptions are overly generous to the reality of their evidence-gathering; it’s a bit idealistic and the implementation is lacking, at best. But if that’s their point behind the screenshot instead of inline text, I still think they’re coming from the right place. They mostly just have a bad implementation.
But at the same time, I get where you’re coming from, even assuming more responsible intentions. A bit more applied critical thinking in such a context likely results in a better implementation. That is largely why the above assumptions seem so generous.
Obviously a journalist isn’t law enforcement but a good one will still gather and retain evidence. They also don’t necessarily need to be as strict as prosecutors but it’s a good standard to try to emulate. To that end, a PDF wouldn’t do.
I wouldn’t doubt that these assumptions are overly generous to the reality of their evidence-gathering; it’s a bit idealistic and the implementation is lacking, at best. But if that’s their point behind the screenshot instead of inline text, I still think they’re coming from the right place. They mostly just have a bad implementation.
But at the same time, I get where you’re coming from, even assuming more responsible intentions. A bit more applied critical thinking in such a context likely results in a better implementation. That is largely why the above assumptions seem so generous.