There is a taste component to it of course, but the history of PDF shows that it's the wrong format for reading on a computer. It was originally meant to be the end result of a publishing process before printing, a layer that sits right between the publishing software and the postscript that gets sent to the printer. This makes the PDF format quite inflexible for reading on a computer, with it being impossible to properly zoom or adjust the reading experience.
Unfortunately many institutions and businesses have ignored its limitation because PDF turned out to be an obvious-but-naive to put a 'sheets of paper' metaphor into a computer system, which in the 1990s appealed to tech illiterate folks doing bare-bones computerization of existing paper systems. So later we got complicated and error-prone tools for editing PDFs, and many random additions to the spec to allow for unusual use cases.
> This makes the PDF format quite inflexible for reading on a computer, with it being impossible to properly zoom or adjust the reading experience.
As an academic researcher, generally speaking I also prefer PDF, and the inflexibility and static nature is a feature, not a bug. I appreciate the fact that a paper will appear the same everywhere, that I can refer to "the top of page 7", etc.
The exception is if I wanted to just skim a paper; in this case, I think I'd prefer HTML.
I'm a huge fan of what arXiv is doing here. It effectively preserves the status quo, while adding an additional option on the side. The HTML option might prove a little bit useful for me, and it is likely to prove extremely useful for people with disabilities.
> I appreciate the fact that a paper will appear the same everywhere, that I can refer to "the top of page 7", etc.
There are many great solutions to this problem, including ones that don't require Javascript at all. This website (https://gwern.net/silk-road) presents a really good example -- every header and sub-header is a clickable anchor. If more granularity is needed, on newer articles most of the paragraphs start with an italicized margin note -- though for technical writing, paragraph anchors might be better. The page also pays careful attention to print CSS and has a 'reader mode' to convert all links to footnotes when printed.
Some websites will also preserve the text you select in a URL anchor, but more often than not this is just cumbersome. It also has a greater risk of not surviving changes to the webpage.
Also intriguing as a solution, which is potentially much stabler across revisions (page numbers are unstable), is the text-anchor-fragment feature Chrome introduced a while back: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments
I would argue that this is more about the departure / firing of John Lasseter then a side effect of Disney. Lasseter's mandate was to rescue Disney animation, and while Pixar went down a bit, it very clearly re-emerged for a while.
Where Disney is now is more about destroying the parks as cultural touchstones in the USA.
Pixar used to work on one movie at a time, and each one that came out was technologically ground breaking[1], a huge media event, and an instant classic beloved by adults and children.
That's still far too much time for far too little progress. Six hundred videos and counting, each over an hour in length. What is there to learn except how not to develop a game, much less (as I recall him claiming) a AAA quality game.
That's not true. He works on it offline, and honestly, even if he did only work on it 2 hours per week, it's STILL not as far along as it should be by now for a supposed game development "guru." You got hoodwinked.
