Not only is that questionably true, it’s also irrelevant: PDF has been around for almost exactly as long as HTML (PDF 1.0 was put out in 1993, HTML 1.0 also in 1993). Those who publish in PDF are not using some archaic format that was rendered irrelevant by the web — they’re using a format that is just as modern as the web.

Anyway, I did wade through all the stuff here only with the hope to find out what PL you were looking at — so could you please be so kind and give us all a hint? (Or do you really take yourself so seriously as to think that the language is indeed dead, once you declared it so for the lack of HTML docs? :-)))))

Sorry you are as thick as the people you are accusing.
Just because *you* dont like PDF its not a reason to rant like this.. specially making it sound as if you are speaking of facts.

So you were trying to learn a new language? thats not a page or two… so “FAQ or whitepaper” but i might imagine a more complicated matter… the kind of ones you might print to read latter.
I personally dont care about pdf (which is defacto a multiplatform webstandard) or HTML (more complicated to store and read offline if more than one page)
and you gave up an declare the death of a “programming language” because you were too lazy to read a PDF… tsk tsk…

The moral of this story as it will remain on the web forever?:

metalab.unc.edu has some funny people working in it.

Let’s boil your argument down, paragraph by paragraph.

I find PDF inconvenient and annoying, so I won’t read any content published in PDF.
Anyone who publishes in PDF is a guaranteed failure, since I won’t read what they wrote and therefore no one else will either.
I don’t need the level of visual fidelity provided by PDF unless I want to print on dead trees. Since I don’t need it, no one else does either. Therefore, anyone who publishes PDF to the web is egotistical and insensitive to the needs of their readers.
I think HTML/CSS fidelity is “good enough” for all types of content, therefore formats that provide better visual fidelity are unnecessary.
No one should be allowed to author using tools that don’t output directly to HTML. I don’t, therefore no one else should be able to.
The Web is the most important medium today. Therefore, all content should be developed in HTML first. Hey Word-level fidelity is plenty good enough for me, and I can almost reach that level of quality using CSS or XLST.
Did I mention that I think PDF sucks?

Seriously, though: I’m a big fan of your books (I even got a thank you in one of them), but this is the most ridiculous, poorly reasoned rant I’ve ever heard from you. You don’t like reading things in PDF? Fine. But don’t try and generalize your personal preferences and prejudices into some kind of rulebook for the Web.

Disclaimer: I work for Adobe, but my opinions are my own.

HTML can be saved to disk for offline viewing, just like PDFs, and a PDF on the internet can’t be viewed unless you’re online or have saved it to disk.

Honestly, the idea that the web is just a medium for getting books to a printer before reading is weird.

And it takes a PDF to do 2 or 3 column output on a screen, thus maximising the amount of scrolling required in order to actually read the damn document. If you really must do that, you need a better reason than “some people might print it out and they’ll really love this format”. (Ok, actually, it can be done in HTML fairly easily, but noone *actually* does it – but every other PDF author seems to delight in doing a magazine-style format.)