I accept your points and agree that the kind of documentation you're thinking about sounds like a poor use case for HTML/EPUB. I do not regularly encounter this sort of documentation.
I've been boosting the idea in the OP, but more for things like "your local council's meeting minutes" or "your English class assignment" or "a research paper".
Though I do want to point out that even moderately complex specs, when designed for the web, can work well. For example, the HTML spec doesn't reference page numbers, but has extensive internal hyperlinking: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/
> Perhaps an EPUB format extended with everything necessary to completely describe a fixed page layout might become competitive with PDF
I highly doubt this will ever happen, for use cases which require fixed layout. But there are plenty of use cases where fixed layout is unnecessary and inferior.
I've been boosting the idea in the OP, but more for things like "your local council's meeting minutes" or "your English class assignment" or "a research paper".
Though I do want to point out that even moderately complex specs, when designed for the web, can work well. For example, the HTML spec doesn't reference page numbers, but has extensive internal hyperlinking: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/
> Perhaps an EPUB format extended with everything necessary to completely describe a fixed page layout might become competitive with PDF
I highly doubt this will ever happen, for use cases which require fixed layout. But there are plenty of use cases where fixed layout is unnecessary and inferior.