On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 19:28:26 UTC, H. S. Teoh via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
Today I skimmed over the PDF spec... and was horrified to
discover that
I had been living in a fool's paradise, thinking that it was
only a
passive *document* format. Turns out that it is yet another of
those
document format turned Turing-complete messes. With its own
embedded
flavor of Javascript, even. (And obviously, it's gratuitously
incompatible with "standard" JS). With the ability to attach
files.
Yeah, it is quite messy. I read it a year ago in order to
generate some PDF files with images, and was surprised by the
length of the PDF format documentation and getting more than one
image onto a page takes planning… I get the impression that they
tried to target Word with all kinds of features for sending in
forms and what not. The text based format looks like it came from
the past… Same with HTTP and SMTP. It looks like a telex from the
1950s. Why on earth did they pick a date format that is so hard
to parse, not to mention all the plain wrong uses of said format
that you also have to parse. HTML5 is great in comparison!
IT tech has always been driven by: ease of installation, ease of
getting started, and if not, the ease of getting a hackish
implementation on it's feet (this is HTTP). Then evolve from that.
As a contrast SVG is actually pretty clean. A bit too complex
perhaps and the integration with HTML is poor. Actually MS' VML
had better integration… Postscript was cool, but could be slow.
