Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
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.