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Robert Cailliau Talks With WikiNews
David Gerard writes "Wikipedia's citizen journalism sister site, Wikinews, has a long and interesting interview with Robert Cailliau, who worked with Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web. 'I also remember a big resistance against PostScript, but what do we see now? PDF everywhere. Fortunately PDF is an open standard and it's fairly elegant, but it could have turned out much worse. SVG did not make it. Tim, who had a longer experience with the internet world, convinced me that the web could only survive if all the code was freely available for everyone who wanted to tinker with it. In 1992-1993 I then worked patiently for some 6 months with CERN's Legal Service to draft a document that put the source code into the public domain. This also implied working to convince the management, up to the Directors, of the need to do so. The result was the document signed on 30 April 1993 that gave the WWW technology to the world.'"
Yes, you see PDF everywhere, but in virtually every case it's just another downloaded document format. Yes, you *can* view PDF in your browser, but you don't actually get any particular benefit from doing it that way no matter what Adobe seems to think: the fraction of PDFs that contain hyperlinks is negligible, and Adobe's embedded reader is balky and unreliable by comparison with the standalone one. And PDFs are inherently harder to read... the print-quality rendering and page orientation means that the text can not be adapted to the viewer. I recall one of Adobe's early ads for PDF, pushing Postscript as a web technology: they had the same page rendered in Postscript and HTML, and the HTML version had been rendered with deliberately odd browser settings... the Postscript version looked much nicer at first glance.
But even in a print ad, with magazine quality rendering, the Postscript version was completely unreadable and the HTML version was totally legible. As an ad for PDF it showed exactly why PDF isn't an appropriate web technology.
This is not, by the way, an inherent shortcoming of Postscript. It's possible to write Postscript code that does its own layout and adapts to the page dimensions and resolution, but no tools generate Postscript like that because the results don't look as good on paper. Perhaps if the Web had early support for Postscript in browsers it would be used that way by now, and used for scripting instead of Javascript, but that didn't happen.
Regardless of what might have been, PDF is not really relevant to the web today, except as a shining example of how not to create content.