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Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

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Re: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

#21

Post by rrrx3 »

rrrx3 wrote: post #19

print.css = "Hi, I need you to continue to support this increasingly smaller edge case, to make this rapidly dwindling user base happy about something that should not, under any circumstances, be happening in 2014." Supporting the printing of pages is inefficient and wasteful. It's the IE6 argument all over again. There are more meaningful ways of both storing and distributing information digitally. Even for atacrawl…

Also, I say this as a designer.

This article criticizes a derivative work's typography? We're really looking at a site's print.css and kicking up a fuss because it's not up to snuff?

"Here, let me print out this Daring Fireball article and mail it to my buddy in New Mexico" ?

Get the actual fuck out of here.

Re: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

#22

Post by DanBC »

onli wrote: post #18
leoc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The premise is questionable. A webpage lives in its own medium, or it is its own medium. You have to bear in mind that this view is diametrically opposed to the principle of separating presentation and content on which CSS, the HTML content-markup elements and so on were based.

I think I know what you are targeting at, but I really don't think so. You can have a separation of presentation and content while still targeting a specific medium, the separation doesn't automatically mean that the content is fitting for every medium. And the elements used here show that pretty clearly. When just regarding HTML and ignoring CSS, you can see its elements that are made for other mediums than paper. I…

> The premise is questionable. A webpage lives in its own medium, or it is its own medium. It is normally meant to be read with an electronic device, to be interactive and linked, though those devices can be quite different of course.

The corruption of the www is something that still makes me sad and angry even though I know I lost the argument years ago.

You should not know, nor care, how the reader is usin the information. Maybe they have screen readers or braille devices or extra huge high contrast text. Maybe they want to print it out.

Most www tex does not need to be forced into an app (which is usually a really bad browser) or to be forced into specific layouts and columns with widgets and gadgets.

I really wish newspapers would learn this lesson.

I want the text. Put all the banners and gizmos and adverts at the top and bottom of the page. Then give me nicely formatted properly styled text and get out of my way.

I am happy to pay for this. Real money, not just leaving an ad-blocker turned off.

Re: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

#23

Post by k1m »

We have a little tool that can produce a multi-column print view (based on paper size and orientation) from most web-based articles. Chrome doesn't support multi-column CSS in its print view yet, so it doesn't work there. If anyone's curious, there's a video here: http://blog.fivefilters.org/post/75603097111/pdf-newspaper-2...

Re: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

#24

Post by dstalli »

I do not understand the need to print out any webpage. The occasional form for a bank still requires faxing but that is usually a pdf anyways.

Also, what about the environmental cost? If we make it easier to print, will more people print? Whether we make it easier to print or not I suspect that as children are exposed to technology at a very young age there will be less of a need/want to print. When you have a tablet that you can take with you anywhere, what's the point?

Re: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

#25

Post by TimFogarty »

alexmuller wrote: post #17

I couldn't disagree more with the author about appended URLs being a problem. A print stylesheet is exactly when you want URLs to be displayed in the text of the page, because there's no other way to find out where that underlined text is supposed to be pointing.

URLs should be displayed for sure, but inline is far too disruptive to smooth reading. I think it would be better done "reference style" if possible. Something similar to how it is done in markdown would be nice:

I get 10 times more traffic from [Google][1] than from [Yahoo][2] or [MSN][3].

[1]: http://google.com/ "Google"

[2]: http://search.yahoo.com/ "Yahoo Search"

[3]: http://search.msn.com/ "MSN Search"

Re: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

#26

Post by zrail »

alexmuller wrote: post #17

I couldn't disagree more with the author about appended URLs being a problem. A print stylesheet is exactly when you want URLs to be displayed in the text of the page, because there's no other way to find out where that underlined text is supposed to be pointing.

Footnotes work great for this, just like the olden days (or exactly like Wikipedia).

Re: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

#27

Post by DanBC »

cmiles74 wrote: post #15

The idea of printing a web page (particularly an article) does seem, in many ways, pointless. As others mentioned, it's a fundamentally different medium that strips out all of the things that make a web page compelling (linking, dynamicism, etc.) On the other hand, there's clear value in stripping out the ephemera and detritus around a work in order to concentrate more centrally on the work itself. While the idea of…

Printable is less valuable to most people, but it still has value.

Plain text is not accessible but a well crafted printable version can double up as both printable and more accessible for some users.

I wonder what the equivalen of "printable" will be? "Text on your ereader that you can annotate"?

Re: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

#28

Post by a_c_s »

dstalli wrote: post #24

I do not understand the need to print out any webpage. The occasional form for a bank still requires faxing but that is usually a pdf anyways. Also, what about the environmental cost? If we make it easier to print, will more people print? Whether we make it easier to print or not I suspect that as children are exposed to technology at a very young age there will be less of a need/want to print. When you have a tablet…

If something is hard to print in a legible/useful manner, somebody is likely to print it once, realize things didn't turn out right, and then try to print it a few more times with different settings until they get something that works (or they give up).

So making things easier to print probably helps the environment more than hurts it.

Re: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

#29

Post by onli »

DanBC wrote: post #22
onli wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I know what you are targeting at, but I really don't think so. You can have a separation of presentation and content while still targeting a specific medium, the separation doesn't automatically mean that the content is fitting for every medium. And the elements used here show that pretty clearly. When just regarding HTML and ignoring CSS, you can see its elements that are made for other mediums than paper. I…

> The premise is questionable. A webpage lives in its own medium, or it is its own medium. It is normally meant to be read with an electronic device, to be interactive and linked, though those devices can be quite different of course. The corruption of the www is something that still makes me sad and angry even though I know I lost the argument years ago. You should not know, nor care, how the reader is usin the info…

Now I feel misunderstood.

I'm perfectly fine with using different devices and different presentations. But changing mediums is stronger than just changing the device or the presentation. The web has an underlying vision that can't be transported to every medium:

> He [Tim Berners-Lee] kicked off by explaining what he means by the two words "semantic" and "web." Underlying the Web was the philosophy of a navigable space, with a mapping from URI to resources. He stressed that a URI was an identifier for a resource, and not a recipe for its retrieval.

Sure, maybe you can argue that you can build something like this with paper, but it is not practical. And you can't do that anymore when going to the semantic web.

Therefore, I don't think you can expect webpages to support mediums like paper that are intrinsically not web-able.

That's all I'm saying. Nothing about ads, nothing about apps, nothing about app-browsers.

PS: Why the downvotes? Did I formulate an attack I didn't realize?

Re: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)

#30

Post by ef4 »

Unfortunately, printed media support in CSS still sucks.

I have a web app that needs to generate printable official documents, and it's really not possible to do a good job with CSS. I resort to generating PDF in Javascript, which is laborious and duplicates a lot of effort.

My biggest gripe is the inability to control the header and footer and the inability to sanely specify where page breaks are allowed.

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