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.
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.
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.
> 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.
TBL’s vision is the starting point, not a straitjacket.
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.
The idea of printing out one of those documents does not conflict with this.
Don Quixote, is that you?
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?