30 years after HTML was invented to support accessibility and collaboration for research and academia and the same day the White House released their new accessibility guidance which happens to be the first time they've published formal new policy natively has HTML rather than PDF - https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/management/ofcio/m-24-08-stre...
I feel surprised by how succinct, easy-to-understand, and sensible the policy (M-23-22) is:
> Default to HTML: HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the standard for publishing documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. HTML provides numerous advantages (e.g., easier to make accessible, friendlier to assistive technology, more dynamic and responsive, easier to maintain). When developing information for the web, agencies should default to creating and publishing content in an HTML format in lieu of publishing content in other electronic document formats that are designed for printing or preserving and protecting the content and layout of the document (e.g., PDF and DOCX formats). An agency should develop online content in a non-HTML format only if necessitated by a specific user need.
Hmmm ... accessibility is essential, but PDF is far better for static documents: There's no straightfoward, standard way to read an html document on another platform. Also, the html document may not be readable in 10+ years (unlike most PDFs), and updates are too fluid and hard to track.
I think the general problem is that the end-user doesn't control an html document, e.g., for annotation, as a local record, etc.
...What are you talking about? HTML files are readable on basically every platform, even moreso because they are fundamentally text files (unlike PDFs, which are binaries). PDFs need special software, html can be read on the command line. Likewise, HTML is dead simple to edit and annotate.
Seriously, name a single device that has PDF support that doesn't allow you to view HTML.
I think you're conflating "html" and "things stored on a server", because all of your objections apply to pdfs stored on a server. The ability to save and annotate pdfs is not an inherent feature of the file format, they exist because the format is such a PITA to interact with that specialized programs have to be written. HTML can be saved just as easily, and usually is (on archive.org).
1. Saving as "Webpage, Single File" (.mhtml): Neither Firefox nor Chrome even showed up in the list of available apps to open it.
2. Saving as "Webpage, Complete": Opened in Chrome but images were broken. Also very difficult to open with the default file browser because it uses a flat folder view and the sidecar folder pollutes the file list.
I was hoping this would work, perhaps you will have different findings. I agree that HTML is the superior format in theory but usability in practice is often lacking. I'm resigned to using both depending on context.
Yes, that's the kind of issue I was talking about. I wish it were otherwise. As a nearby comment pointed out, epub is a potential solution (and I wish arXiv embraced it - without my knowing their other requirements or epub's accessibility features). It's essentially packaged html.
How do I save an HTML document locally, and annotate it, in an easily sharable form, and in a form that is stable - i.e., in a way that will be readable and useable in 20-50 years?
Basically any HTML document from 20-30 years ago (can't go any further because it didn't exist 50 years ago) will be completely readable and usable. The only issue is people creating content (not styling) in formats besides HTML.
As far as annotations, you can use the native <ruby>[1] tag, or strikethough, but if you mean "literally drawing on the text" then, yeah, you're looking for an image format at that point (which is fundamentally what PDF is), but we shouldn't default to storing text in image formats just because of one specific use case. (Also, as I said above, the only reason tools exist to easily do that in PDFs exist is because everyone insists on using a format that's hard to edit. )
Also, note that the context I was responding to was US legal documents, not something more presentation-heavy.
You say it as if pdf is somehow better. To begin with it's a proprietary format. If Adobe goes bankrupt or obscure tomorrow, pdf will go out of use as a failed technology.
I mean, how do I save it locally on one platform and read it on any platform? Or share it with someone else to read (without them downloading software)? I.e., we don't have a standard, local, single-file html format.
We could have such a format if browser and os vendors were interested in supporting such a use case. Unfortunately, they aren't.
On the browser side, supporting all-in-one html files can be as simple a reading a single multipart-encoded page. Heck, if they support automatically serializing all external resources as datauris when saving pages, then most browsers will be able to open them without any modification.
On the OS side, operating systems can treat html files as first class citizens; execute them in an offline sandbox (most operating systems have embedded webviews), then extract icon, title, description and other metadata to present to the user. An icon the consists of a blank page with a small browser icon in the corner doesn't tell me anything about what the page is about. This needs to change.
In short, html can be easily made nicer to deal with locally thanks to all the parts already being in place. The problem is that no one (tech giants, os vendors) are interested in doing this.
.mhtml (or .mhtm) is that format. It's an archive containing an HTML file along with all the resources it references (JavaScript, CSS, and images). These browsers support it: Internet Explorer, Edge, Opera, Chrome, Yandex, and Vivaldi. Create one by saving the web page and choosing the .mhtml format. Safari supports another format called webarchive.
> I mean, how do I save it locally on one platform and read it on any platform?
Ctrl/Meta/Cmd + S should do the trick, or "File > Save page", and you get a HTML file you can open in any browser. If there is images, they'll most likely be loaded remotely, or worst case not load at all. But the rest of the structure is there.
A web page is much more than one file. Also, I'm looking for something with end-user control, where they can save the current document statically and long-term.
Despite all our advances, we lack an editable, local, multimedia, platform (and form-factor) independent, self-contained file - essentially a word-processing file for the 21st century (and I mean it's almost a quarter-century overdue). epub has that potential as a format, and being based on web standards it has capability, a universe of supporting tools and technology, and easy adoption to different applications.
But I haven't heard anyone else express that particular interest, and as of a few years ago epub doesn't allow annotations and is not stable (i.e., I don't know that today's epub file will be readable in 20 or 50 years) - two essential requirements for a serious local content, imho.
And even if it meets those specifications, we need epub editors that are the equivalent of word processsors for non-technical users.
This is awesome, thanks for sharing! For those interested here are some similar recent or upcoming efforts to encourage more participatory and generative civic engagement:
Ecological and resource extractive debt is not magic, they have limits and externalities that most financial systems don't fully account for in their balance sheets.
This is something I have to remind people of all the time - usually I just get blank stares.
Forget the dollars and cents tokens on wealth, they can and are manipulated but intentionally and unintentionally. How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? That is the real currency we have to work with.
All the debt in the world means nothing if we cannot produce the goods with the token we produced assuming the resources would be there.
If I have a debt of £50 and you have the corresponding £50 asset that you like to look at, then you don't need any material amount of energy to get to that state of happiness.
I have to remind people all the time of a simple truth - there isn't a one to one relationship between money and stuff.
And money isn't real. It's largely an illusion. At best a social relation.
Millions of years of what? We have maybe a few hundred years of helium if we’re generous with our assumptions and we’re literally squirting that into balloons and letting it float away into the atmosphere and off into space. It’s literally an unrecoverable loss.
This is just one of the many resource limits we’re facing as a species, and this is how we address it today.
Since you brought helium into discussion, why do we fill party balloons with helium?
Just how great is the risc of filling them with hidrogen? I know it's flamable and leaks through many materials. But in the context of party balloons just how great is that risc? The quantity is very small. And no ones life depends on it. And in the case of fire, that quantity would burn almost instantly. I doubt it would even have the time to ignite anything other than another flamable gas.
Has anyone actually seriously worked out how much party balloons contribute to the loss of helium from the atmosphere?
And isn't helium an expected waste product from fusion reactors?
Not saying it's not an issue but I'm not convinced it's worth getting too upset over just yet.
Apparently 8%. But all of these industries waste it unnecessarily, due to our failing to price in or consider the future scarcity.
Helium as a waste product of fusion reactors is such a pipe dream, and will produce such tiny volumes should that ever happen, that it is not a remotely realistic solution to the problem.
Out of curiosity I put the numbers into Wolfram Alpha, and it suggests that even if 100% of our current power (all power not just electricity) needs came from fusing deuterium and tritium into helium, those reactors would make only about 5.3% of our current helium consumption.
That's all "lifting balloons" - I'd think the majority of which would be for weather balloons etc.?
You're probably right about He from fusion reactors but if we have 100s of years to solve it who knows.
Who knows is exactly the problem. Hand waving this away for future generations to deal with is exactly the problem. If we can’t imagine how we’ll solve it, we should probably strive not to create the mess.
But we do know that plenty of other current human activities, primarily around extracting stuff from deep underground and pumping it into the atmosphere, are going to cause huge issues for even just our kid's generation, with no realistic technology likely to be developed quickly enough to solve it(*). If we hypothetically needed to use up the earth's remaining helium to fix that I'd support doing so. Running out of helium isn't expected to introduce a risk of making the planet largely uninhabitable, as far as I'm aware.
(*) I'm more or less convinced that such a miracle technology is the only hope we have of avoiding catastrophic change. I'm baffled why there's not massively more funding into researching potential geoengineering solutions, given the stakes. Even fossil fuel companies would benefit!
I’m really not sure what point you’re making. Where has anyone proposed a climate solution by using all of the world’s helium?
What we do use helium for today are things like MRI machines that are medically invaluable, and we do so wastefully potentially denying future generations this technology.
Even if we eventually find alternatives, it may be inferior or we may otherwise deny them technological advantages of similar importance that would be more accessible through access to helium.
The problem is that today Helium is cheap enough we’re happy to boil an MRI machine’s worth off into space for a child’s birthday party.
Climate change is simply another face of the same coin of indifference to the costs we confer on others.
Maybe someone will invent Helium fission power! I did say "hypothetical".
I don't think we disagree, I just consider other ecological challenges far more serious than running out of Helium.
What do you have in mind as a "millions of years" power source?
At current rates, fossil fuels will last a few centuries, nuclear a few millennia.
Although geothermal would last for geological timescales, the estimated maximum output only covers current electricity use (~2 TW, well short of the ~17 TW total power use, and ideally we'd increase the minimum power use per person to get closer to European or American levels rather than keeping our current distribution).
The kinetic rotational energy of the earth would last us 400 million years.
Sun will last a few billion, but then we're no longer talking about extractive technologies.
While there is a vast amount of resources below us, the CO2 above us that's causing us so much trouble would form a layer of just 3.8mm (0.15 inch) of dry ice if it was all deposited on Earth's surface as a solid.
I use PhotoStructure for local management on external hard drives, BackBlaze for offsite backup, and a combination of Flickr and Google Photos for sharing the highlights.
All that does is give you an invalid certificate warning when you go to the site. How does that warrant shutting it down. If you can't see that this is 100% politically motivated. Well... there is one born every minute...a <blank> and his money are soon parted....
Also note that Data.gov was participating in a Bug Bounty program through HackerOne which means it was actively encouraging people to find vulnerabilities but is no longer able to respond to them - https://hackerone.com/tts
Here's the official statement:
“As data.gov is not a static site, it requires staff monitoring and maintenance to be online,” a GSA spokesperson told FedScoop in a statement. “Because personnel that monitor and maintain the site are currently furloughed, data.gov redirects to usa.gov. The decision to take data.gov offline is consistent with previous funding lapse practices.”
