In 2020, Nielsen made the case again, writing, “After 20 years of watching users perform similar tasks on a variety of sites that use either PDFs or regular web pages, one thing remains certain: PDFs degrade the user experience.”
Good luck saving a HTML version of any modern web page and being able to read it in twenty or thirty years time. HTML just wasn't designed for that.
An issue with this is that the print CSS of most websites is an afterthought.
While it’s possible to alter the design with @media print as well as the page breaks, few websites do this. You are often left with broken layouts, empty pages, or nonsense page breaks.
For some insane reason, one of the stores we use that you can order online and pickup at the store, when you try to print the page with the barcode, the barcode does not print. We end up having to take a screenshot and print that. It's just utterly baffling, especially for this specific use case.
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Good luck saving a HTML version of any modern web page and being able to read it in twenty or thirty years time. HTML just wasn't designed for that.
HTML was; Javascript wasn't.
I used to click "Print" (macOS) and save to file in (ironically for this article) PDF... does it work for you?
An issue with this is that the print CSS of most websites is an afterthought.
While it’s possible to alter the design with @media print as well as the page breaks, few websites do this. You are often left with broken layouts, empty pages, or nonsense page breaks.
For some insane reason, one of the stores we use that you can order online and pickup at the store, when you try to print the page with the barcode, the barcode does not print. We end up having to take a screenshot and print that. It's just utterly baffling, especially for this specific use case.
Good luck doing the same in PDF with embedded javascript, which is the stuff that's not designed, not HTML