Comment by armcat
1 day ago
I politely disagree. The original intent Tim Berners Lee had [1] was to create a navigable way of finding documents and information. Not printable. The entire issue we have today is that we have blurred both the navigable and the printable concepts. A website should just be a simple clean space for easily navigating and conveying intended information. To print, we have latex and other markup methods that are perfect for that.
I politely disagree. What does Tim Berners Lee’s opinion of anything have to do with anything? What use is Latex when I want a readable hardcopy of a web page?
What a good point! The web would be much nicer looking if browsers accepted pages written in LaTeX as well as pages written in HTML.
After all TeX is all about high quality printing on paper.
Browsers already accept PDF. TeX files aren't portable.
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A TeX distribution on my computer (mactex) is like 4 gigabytes. Definitely not "bundle-with-a-web-browser" worthy.
Well, I want to retire and not have to work for another 30+ years, but I guess we do not always get what we want :(
The original design of the WWW has morphed a dozen times between what he built and what we have today. And while I don’t love every innovation, there are plenty of things we take for granted today that wasn’t possibly with HTML1, such as banking apps.
So I don’t think there’s much merit arguing about what doesn’t exist any longer.
Banking apps are not “websites” by coincidence they happen to be apps using same technology to show the interface but there is huge difference between website and web app.
This distinction is important especially because people are notoriously confusing the two and expect web apps to be like websites and conversely implement websites with tech that is supposed to be used to build web applications bloating internet pipes with JS where HTML and CSS would be sufficient.
There is a big difference, one is spelt “website” and the other “web app”.
Beyond that, the distinction is purely arbitrary. Same tech stacks, same delivery methods, and the same client-side display tools.
The biggest problem is that we went to mobile-first design along with a horrible split between backend and frontend functionality. If you hit view source on a lot of sites these days a page will be just a stub for calling javascript that actually puts the html on the page. It's not so much a function of hiding what the site does as it is web developers are afraid to write html and instead punt that into their javascript framework-of-frameworks.
> The entire issue we have today is that we have blurred both the navigable and the printable concepts.
I politely disagree, the problem is we have made websites a javascript hellscape with all that original intent broken by design.
I think that's an orthogonal issue. A webpage can be crazy with loads of JS stuff, but still print nicely or behave well defined when it comes to semantics, screen readers etc.
While what you say is correct, the point is that the excessive use of JS is what makes nowadays the print command the only way to save most Web pages.
Years ago I was never using the "print" command in browsers. I used the "save" command. But now the "save" command is useless for most sites, because the saved scripts frequently do not work offline or they do not work even online, but from local files. So the only alternative is "print", which is extraordinarily buggy in both Firefox and Chrome, but their developers do not give a ****, so there are many years or perhaps decades since printing in Firefox or Chrome renders completely incorrectly almost all Web pages.
As a workaround for the stupid rendering in Firefox and Chrome, I frequently print twice a Web page, once in Portrait and once in Landscape, because the corrupted parts of the printed page will typically occur in different locations. Moreover, I may have to fiddle with other printing parameters, e.g. whether to print backgrounds or not, or with different margins and paper sizes, because it is unpredictable which settings will work best with a given site.
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Not a facetious question, but you don't build websites for a living, I think?
This kind of fairly idealistic thinking is so far from the ordinary web development norm that you have to go past "supporting that version of IE with 0.7% market share" to get to it.
I used to. Apologies if it came on too strong, but it wasn't idealistic thinking. For print, I find that I can easily use AI to turn a web page into a nice clean LaTeX and offer that as a PDF for those that want to print or read offline.
But that's impractical (not to mention non-deterministic and a bit of a privacy risk) for any kind of online printability of dynamic information.
Most "I need a printout of this" information is timely and dynamic and needs fixing in a physical form.
A print stylesheet seems like something you could get an LLM to write.
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It’s weird that you’re opposed to a few lines of CSS but happy to boil the ocean to implement the same thing via non-deterministic AI.
I mean, everyone has their own workflow preferences so I wouldn’t criticise you for wanting to use AI in your own personal set up. But it feels like your two statements there should be moral opposites of each other.
>I politely disagree. The original intent Tim Berners Lee had [1] was to create a navigable way of finding documents and information. Not printable.
And I politely disagree right back. My particular problem with this has to do with purchasing. When I make a purchase at work, I need something I can attach to a purchase request as a quote. Note that this is often not a formal quote, but rather evidence of what whatever I want to buy will cost.
A simple way to do this is to print a shopping cart to PDF and attach that to the PR. Some web sites do this just fine and others do it horribly. They should do better.
This might be more of an edge case than people who complain about websites that require JS, which is itself a number that rounds to basically zero.
Maybe you could capture the full height of the website as a screenshot? There are extensions that do this, and there is some degree of native support for the feature nowadays.
Maybe it's a weird, unusual edge case but maybe not. Lots of people need to keep records of various things for various reasons. In my personal life, I also "print" lots of stuff from various web sites to PDF for record-keeping purposes. This is absolutely routine for me, I do it all the time.
Thankfully, most of the web sites for which I want to do this — banks and other financial institutions, but others also — have easy ways to create printable receipts because they know that people want to do things like this.
And you can disagree, but when I come across some e-commerce site where printing what I want or need to PDF doesn't work because the site just makes a horrible unreadable mess out of it, I think, well here's a set of "web developers" who are just not good at what they do.
(And yes, I fall back to screen shots when I must.)
The resolution of screenshots is typically unacceptable for most uses, especially when the bitmap were scaled, which would introduce blurring.
The Web is meant to have links and interactive content and be navigated, sure.
But to expect every author also upload a PDF? I mean, TeX is great for what it is, but there's a reason _the web_ adapted print stylesheets.
Even if (La)TeX (or Typst, or Postscript or anything else) were easy to learn, you're left with maintaining 2 copies or a compilation system which is also a challenge.
TBL’s vision is the starting point, not a straitjacket.
And that's the crux!
The idea of printing out one of those documents does not conflict with this.
Don Quixote, is that you?
Fun fact: In the early days, website projects were mostly allocated at the top level of an organisation. As top-level officers used to consume the Web in printouts, the print view was also the default customer view and thus of utter importance.
Also in my experience, the higher you go in an organisation, the greater the chance of finding an older person of great ability with tired eyes and well-masked dyslexia who just wants to print your thing and go through it with a highlighter and a sharpie, and whose PA just used to always do that for them without anyone finding out.
Even now this is not that uncommon; I have worked with an entrepreneur masking significant dyslexia in just the last five years. Printability was just something he needed so he could properly scrutinise.
Print is still an accessibility thing, I think.