The promise would be that in HTML, everything is reformatted to look great on any line length.

But there is a kind of integration attack going on: Once we have the HTML version, why not enhance the paper with things PDF can't do? After all, HTML5 offers limitless possibilities to make the 3D figures interactive, run simulations, have the examples to be toys you can play with, etc.

Once these seemingly harmless new features are there, who would want to go back to the PDF version, which is a
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static, cumbersome and arcane? Once we are there, we will definitely need versioning of publications because if papers become software, they will have bugs and need bug fixes.

I feel very insecure about this future. I am unhappy with how static and old-fashioned it is of us, to stick to this A4-PDF-paper format, for documents which are consumed on laptop and iPhone screens, and it never really fits and scrolling and zooming and whatnot.
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@zuphilip my point is not the mode of presentation or production, but rather if there exists such thing as a “final version”. How would #academia change if all research was published like software, release 0.11a_p2 etc.

And then it’s a new discussion for super conservative fields like #math. We have some state of the art papers that are 50+ years.

@zuphilip @tomkalei I'm in a completely different field (tech law), but there are definitely (small and big) points in previously published papers that I would like to update. Maybe a law has changed, a talk with a colleague changed my perspective, there's a nuance that I didn't see at the time.

Not sure how this would work, e.g. peer review for each small thing could be cumbersome.

@Gerard @zuphilip and it breaks citations that are not to specific versions.

And if this becomes the norm, the culture changes. If you can make updates later it’s less of a problem to jump to potentially wrong conclusions now and update later.