This is not a SFW instance. NSFW communities will be tagged, and efforts will be made to keep SFW communities clean, but proceed at your own comfort level.
I have a few, I’m sure, but the one that comes to mind is my hatred of PDFs. Or, I suppose more accurately, the things people choose to use PDFs for. If something is not primarily meant to be printed, then a PDF is a suboar choice to something like HTML. Worse, virtually EVERY place you’re getting a PDF from is already a website so they already have the ability to give you HTML.
You can create a single HTML file, embedding all images, CSS, JavaScript, etc. directly into the file. Then you can open it in your browser. It works. It’s easier to read too, unless you want to print it. I would argue that in the vast majority of cases they actually aren’t being printed. And get this, you can actually print HTML files too, ya know. So PDF is really only better if you need to print something with a very specific and strict layout, like a brochure or something.
“But Jackby, I use PDFs and I love printing them”
Okay, that’s fine, I just think you’re the exception. I think most people open them in browser or some PDF viewer and never print them ever.
My favorite response to this opinion was someone telling me that having all the CSS and JS in one file makes it load slower. Like uh, off my computer? Because I’m talking about distributing the file itself, not hosting it on a website. I think web folks just latch onto best practices for the web.
Fully agree. I think I know the hidden reason though:
PDFs are a nightmare to parse
Virtually every PDF parser out there attempts to parse them visually which typically leads to poor and inconsistent results.
HTML, JSON, YAML, Markdown, CSVs, heck even TXT
can be mechanically and deterministically parsed easily
I have ADHD. I pretty much have to automate as much of my life as possible to get by. But as you point out, almost no proprietary service allows you to export/download your data in a format that makes it easy to use for integration/automation purposes. It very much upsets me that I can’t easily locally process my:
bank data
paystubs
receipts
shifts at work
healthcare data
etc ad nauseam
I think their reasons for this are that they don’t want it to be easy. The harder they make it, the more reason you have to exclusively look at this data in their app/website. Asshole move if you ask me, as the quickest way forward is usually brute force manual data entry.
I have a few, I’m sure, but the one that comes to mind is my hatred of PDFs. Or, I suppose more accurately, the things people choose to use PDFs for. If something is not primarily meant to be printed, then a PDF is a suboar choice to something like HTML. Worse, virtually EVERY place you’re getting a PDF from is already a website so they already have the ability to give you HTML.
You can create a single HTML file, embedding all images, CSS, JavaScript, etc. directly into the file. Then you can open it in your browser. It works. It’s easier to read too, unless you want to print it. I would argue that in the vast majority of cases they actually aren’t being printed. And get this, you can actually print HTML files too, ya know. So PDF is really only better if you need to print something with a very specific and strict layout, like a brochure or something.
“But Jackby, I use PDFs and I love printing them”
Okay, that’s fine, I just think you’re the exception. I think most people open them in browser or some PDF viewer and never print them ever.
My favorite response to this opinion was someone telling me that having all the CSS and JS in one file makes it load slower. Like uh, off my computer? Because I’m talking about distributing the file itself, not hosting it on a website. I think web folks just latch onto best practices for the web.
Fully agree. I think I know the hidden reason though:
I have ADHD. I pretty much have to automate as much of my life as possible to get by. But as you point out, almost no proprietary service allows you to export/download your data in a format that makes it easy to use for integration/automation purposes. It very much upsets me that I can’t easily locally process my:
I think their reasons for this are that they don’t want it to be easy. The harder they make it, the more reason you have to exclusively look at this data in their app/website. Asshole move if you ask me, as the quickest way forward is usually brute force manual data entry.