Why web pages
HTML quietly won.
Since 1993 the documents that decided things have ended in .pdf: the investor deck, the board pack, the monthly client report. That habit is breaking, and the format itself is the reason.
PDF was made for the printer.
PDF guarantees the same page on every printer, which mattered when printing was the last thing that happened to a document. Hardly anyone prints the board pack now. A web page is made for the screen it lands on, so it can do what paper never could.
- A proposal’s price updates when the client switches an option off.
- A 40-page report reads properly on a phone in a taxi.
- Fix a figure on Tuesday, and the link they opened on Monday shows it.
A PDF
A web page
September, by region
- North$212k
- South$168k
- West$123k
Two things changed at once.
The writer changed. More of what we send is drafted by an agent or with AI tools, and what comes back is a web page, because a page holds what a document needs: a table that keeps its shape, a diagram, a chart that recalculates. Who typed it matters less than what it can do.
The reader changed. The investor reads your deck on a phone between two meetings. A PDF has to be downloaded and pinched; a page simply opens.
“HTML is the new markdown.”
His point is that people read a page where they skip a long file. Whether they actually read yours is what HTMLRadar shows you.
Sending is still stuck in the PDF era.
To send a page today, you flatten it into a PDF and lose every chart and toggle that made it worth building. Or you paste an open link. Anyone can forward it. You wait three days for a reply, and nobody tells you whether page 12, the one with the ask, was ever opened. The tools built to track documents were designed for files, and they still treat a page like one.
The other half.
HTMLRadar began with an investor deck and a client proposal, both built as web pages, and no good way to send either. Now the page goes out whole. Every chart and toggle still works, on a link only the right people can open, and you see who read which part. Fix something after it is sent, and the same link shows it.