The great thing about PDF, even the reason for its existence and adoption, is that a (valid) PDF file will look exactly the same — the same characters in the same fonts at exactly the same positions on every page — on any printer or display across the world, and across time. With HTML (what you propose) it is hard even to get something to look the same at different browser window widths, let alone different devices or different versions of browsers.
Sometimes that's what you want (and when the visual appearance is not important, it may make sense to not use PDF), but I definitely wouldn't want to see PDF “dead”.
Yeah, except the devices are different, so there's no point in trying to use the same page size on them, you only torture the reader.
> With HTML (what you propose) it is hard even to get something to look the same at different browser window widths, let alone different devices or different versions of browsers.
Only if you're trying to use some fancy layout, or if your idea of ‘the same’ is literal. Use a simple ‘text, image, text’ layout like it's the days of HTML 2.0, but with better formatting—and you'll have zero problems reformatting for different displays or reflowing the document into columns. Notice how all popular content sites adopted this layout in the main content column of their pages—and the pages work nicely on both desktop and mobile devices, and are captured fine with Pocket, Evernote and the like.
If you're trying to use a fancy layout for a paper-like publication, the question is why the hell you're doing that.
I understand what I believe to be your actual point: it would be nice if documents were more often published in a format that doesn't completely fix their layout and visual appearance. And I agree with that! When I'm reading something purely for its information, and don't care too much about the appearance, I too would like it if it weren't in a visually-fixed format. (That's what I said in the first comment tot: “when the visual appearance is not important, […] not use PDF”.)
But my point is that for the goal of completely fixing the visual appearance, PDF is a pretty decent format (better than say, photographic images of the page), which is why it exists.
When you say you want “the day when PDF is dead”, it appears as though you cannot imagine anyone wanting that goal.
Here are two examples:
Suppose you are an author of books (a physical artefact that will inhabit libraries for centuries; forget about digital displays and all that nonsense for a moment) and care about their typographic quality. Then you will want to make sure of things like:
• that the words have hyphenation (to make the aforementioned good line-breaks possible), but not any poor hyphenation (https://tug.org/docs/liang/),
• that the typefaces chosen are in harmony with each other, that the paper size leads to a good “form factor” for your book, and is appropriate given the kind of binding used, etc.
• and finally, that after you have carefully proofread and verified every line of every page, the reader will not see something totally different, with lines of different widths broken in different places, etc.
Or if you cannot relate to that example, then forget all that, because it's just a special case of a simpler, more general case: suppose you know that your document is ultimately going to be read on paper, and you'd like to make sure it can look the same ten years from now as it does today.
Then PDF (especially PDF/A) is a decent format for this case.
(PS: I've seen very few websites that have good typography in the sense that when printed they approach anything like the quality of a halfway decent book.)
Only if you're trying to use some fancy layout, or if your idea of ‘the same’ is literal.
Actually, the plainest CSS-free HTML renders inexplicably small in some modern flagship phones... I mean the proprietary viewport meta tag, which is in the process of becoming CSS: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/
Sometimes that's what you want (and when the visual appearance is not important, it may make sense to not use PDF), but I definitely wouldn't want to see PDF “dead”.