Pancake Corner - Famous Dutch Pancakes in the heart of Amsterdam.
pancake-corner.nl
We have a delicious pancake for everyone's individual taste or enjoy our soups, salads, meat or fish dishes and end it with a Dutch dessert!

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.
  • Lembot_0002@lemm.eeEnglish
    10·
    1 month ago

    Because engineers don’t make decisions anymore. Some manager (with education in law or finance) said: “I saw it there. It was WOW. I want the same”. Convenience? Pffft, that’s for losers who cannot have “WOW”.

  • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    1 month ago

    Can you “print” it? There are ways to “print” to a PDF or PS file. Haven’t done it in years tho, but maybe this gets you a usable file.

    • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOP
      2·
      28 days ago

      Did you try it? When I print the Pancake Corner menu page to PDF, it produces 10 pages of web junk and only one of those pages is the menu. The one page that is the menu only shows the cover of the menu (even if I have turned the page in the interactive application).

      I could perhaps inspect the code and work out a way to hack around the obsticles, but let me give some context: when planning to visit a city for which I do not live for a short time (maybe just 1 day), I do some searches on the kind of cuisine I would like and get a list of URLs to ~20—30 restaurants. The goal is to quickly accumulate a local copy of many menus which can be used not just in advance planning but to have them on my offline phone for on-the-fly decisions. Spending all day planning out a day is a bit impractical for the benefit. PDFs from HTML contain a lot of junk, not just the menu, which then has a purpose-defeatingly-poor UX for trying to quickly see a menu on a tiny phone screen while running from one attraction to the next.

      So in reality @Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe’s scenario plays out: the restaurant might lose my business because I cannot be bothered to go through all their hoops to get a menu in my local storage. Restaurants with easily reached PDFs have a business advantage because they are better exposed to get more of my attention. The other restaurants still have a chance if no menu seems enticing but they are a 2nd resort and may get lucky from my blind arbitrary selection.