I think it’s important to understand why writing needs to be formatted, especially in the digital age. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that you need to have a site that has a thousand bells and whistles. The fact is, I’ve never seen anything but slow-down, and more importantly, security vulnerabilities created by having a site jammed to the gills with javascript and fancy features. In fact, in some cases, I’ve seen websites that still are loading as slow as they did back in 2008.
Frankly, this is ridiculous – if a small business needs a website, it should do two things: connect the business with customers, and provide listings of services. Other things, like hosting payments, can often be done through third party services for little or no cost – just the cost of hosting a webserver, or renting server space from a company.
The fact is, a lot of companies take advantage of technological illiteracy to sell customers things they don’t need. My friend, for example was paying around 30 bucks a month for what amounted to a glorified QR code redirect. Now, obviously – my goal is to make money, but I’m not here to rip people off. Which brings me to the topic above: why isn’t there a PDF reader or some kind of document embedding software here?
The fact is, you already have one on your computer. If something can be rendered in HTML or Markup – we can render it natively in the browser. And if it has to be delivered as a PDF, your PDF should be formatted in a way that the user can download it quickly, and there just isn’t a way – or a need – to compete with the native pdf browser that’s either IN the browser, or even better, natively installed on your computer.