I just don’t get why this shitty practice of embedding a JS PDF app in a web page seems to be proliferating. It’s not just restaurant menus. It’s store catalogs of all kinds, and community newsletters that are doing this stupid shit.

They make their PDF menu undownloadable in order to present some fancy page turning animation that only works in some subset of browsers.

I just visited websites of 19 Dutch restaurants hoping to download menus for offline use. Results:

• 3 had downloadable PDFs
• 2 had images that could be saved That’s it. The rest either had completely dysfunctional websites or interactive HTML or interactive PDF that could not be easily downloaded. HTML could be saved but that’s a shit show overall… a disaster when trying to create an MHT file then try opening that from a smartphone.