No one should need JS to see the soups when that could be handled perfectly fine with CSS. I wish restaurants would just make their homepage a PDF of the menu.

I agree. There are lots of free AstroJS themes for restaurants that generate static html that you can host somewhere like Firebase hosting for free.

- https://astro.build/themes/details/astropie/

- https://astro.build/themes/details/astrorante/

- https://astro.build/themes/details/tastyyy-restaurant-websit...

I agree with no JS, but why PDF over HTML? Hard-wrapping for letter-sized paper (ok, a PDF doesn't need to be letter-sized, but most menus are approximately that) with crapshoot reflow options for soft-wrapping in certain viewer apps is pretty dicey on a phone, mitigated only slightly by rotating the phone sideways.

The only benefit I can think of is if it leads to more frequent updates by the restaurant, due to limited skillset.

To be fair this project uses zero 3rd party npm modules for runtime. The total runtime JS it uses is 1.76kB in size.

PDF:s are not great on mobile. And you can’t easily translate them (I often translate restaurant menus when they are on a website with just 2 clicks)

No one is browsing the internet without JS today (within margin of error). Whether or not this "should" be the case, it is.

A PDF can't get the user halfway through the delivery process before seeing the soups.

PDF is an enormous pain in the tits to view on a phone and has significant accessibility issues for people using assistive technologies.

It's not even about blind people. People with ADHD or dyslexia use assistive technology, which frequently makes an absolute horlicks of interpreting PDF. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to move a lot of documentation at work away from PDF and onto just straight HTML.

Plain old HTML, with thin CSS on it to make it not be black-and-white Times New Roman. Kicking it oldschool.

PDF is a terrible experience on mobile

The soup shows for me without JS.