[onli]

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.

But by printing a webarticle, you are transforming it into another medium, onto paper. Therefore it is actually a very strong assumption - and one I don't follow - to "expect them to support the habits of people who prefer to read longer articles in print".

And that even before talking about protecting the nature from wasteful habits like this.

But sure, if you enjoy it, build a small print.css, removing everything unnecessary and making it readable in black&white. Just be aware of the medium change, and that a good design in the one medium won't necessary work in the other.

[leoc]

> 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.

[onli]

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. It is Hyper Text after all, not Text.

And when just regarding CSS, you have all those elements that are of no use on paper, like position: fixed.

Or just think of the issue in responsive design of wanting to have another, shorter text for mobile devices. There, even the content alone is not fitting for the medium, regardless of the presentation.

[DanBC]

> 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.

[onli]

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?

[Dylan16807]

I don't understand. Paper can't navigate but you don't need navigation. Why can't the underlying vision of everything except navigation work just as well?

[onli]

The web is more than a place to read an article like on paper. It is a place where articles (ressources) have their own URL and are linkable, sometimes even in both directions (think of trackbacks and pingbacks, following the vision that was way more prominent in the beginning, or xanadu). You need navigation for that, it is essential for what the web provides.

[zokier]

> 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 and me both. It is kinda funny (for the lack of better word) how Wikipedia is kinda what I imagine hypertext/web was initially envisioned to be (except for its centralized nature). But it lives another layer above the web, being a web-app for handling hypertext with it's own UI (nested inside browser UI which in turn is nested inside system UI), its own markup format (because HTML evolved away from being pure hypertext format), and its own update mechanism (instead of HTTP methods, because REST is hard, lets go shopping)

[lifthrasiir]

I agree to this a lot. The printing medium is an entirely different target to optimize; say, the figures need to be consolidated to individual pages or made small enough to fit the aside, all the convenient hyperlinked references need to be at least reconsidered as they will constantly stop the reading when rendered, even the document structures need to be reconsidered (we have a table of contents for a reason). Heck, even that website itself does not optimize for the figures either---lots of irrelevant images take up their own pages, one per page. It is hard, and takes real work to get that good enough.

[alok-g]

>> And that even before talking about protecting the nature from wasteful habits like this.

Unfortunately, reading on paper is an order-of-magnitude better than reading on the screen. I have consistently noted that:

1. I absorb the material better when reading in printed form, not sure why. 2. My eyes strain less. 3. I find three times more typos (when proof-reading my own stuff), not sure why. 4. Annotating and highlighting is doable (possible on screen, but does not even compare to the same on paper). 5. Moving back and forth within the material is a lot better.

Not that I like hurting nature, but technology doesn't yet offer a suitable replacement here. E-Ink helps but fails on #4 till better products (like Sony's recently announced E-reader) show up and are less costly (Sony's priced at $1000+). Also, moving content to the new device needs to be at least as convenient as printing (and while staying within the firewall).

>> It is normally meant to be read with an electronic device

This is exactly what OP is questioning, and I fully agree. Why is this normal?!

>> to be interactive and linked, though those devices can be quite different of course.

I am web newbie. But I wonder about mankind spending so much effort on making web pages "responsive" based on the screen sizes of the various devices, and yet, not applying the same techniques to printing.

[hagbardgroup]

Part of this is because most web media is awful for reading.

Column widths are standardized in print, magazine, and books for a reason: to minimize eye movement required. The larger that web screens get, the broader the column lengths often are, which forces more eye movement, which causes eye strain, which requires vision interruption, which impedes reading comprehension.

Smart phones are great for short articles because the screens are roughly the width of a newspaper column. It forces the text into an appropriate width, rather than expanding to fit the available monitor space like many websites do.

Screens also tend to cause eye strain.

Even if you do make pages responsive, chances are that the user will not realize that they should be using a skinny window or that they should shrink the text. Further, commercial web publications tend to optimize for maximized windows to display ads.

In print, we have hundreds of years of professional readability and layout experience. On the web we have some cobbled together standards. Most people who are responsible for handling web design aren't layout/typography/etc. specialists. So really basic mistakes get made all the time and few people notice them because our knowledge base has effectively eroded because there are so many other priorities to worry about on the web.

[alok-g]

This was insightful. Thanks.

Readability with paper is better even without columns though. Also, since I do majority of my work on big desktop screens, positioning with respect to the body also could be impacting. Using bigger fonts on-screen helps, though does not work out on many websites designed with small fonts.

[hagbardgroup]

You're welcome. Yes wrt paper being better even without professional layout.

I didn't really start to get these things until doing some print work after years of being internet-only.

[ggchappell]

The writer is talking about articles, as he notes in his first sentence. The problem he points out is part of a larger problem: that web content clearly intended to be read, is often presented a context that makes reading inconvenient or difficult.

If someone posts an article on the web, I don't think it's too much to ask that the article be presented in a way that enables it to be read conveniently. Good print formatting is part of that.