[cmiles74]

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" becomes less and less tenable, the core idea of focusing on the work itself is still important. In some ways it seems a loss that these ideas have become conflated.

[frik]

I printed out the HTML 5 spec from W3C. http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/single-page.html

It's so much easier to browse through pages on the desk, the fit on 30 pages or so that I stapled together.

[DanBC]

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"?

[Dylan16807]

Sometimes you remove the dynamicism on purpose.