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armcat • today at 12:32 PM • 9 replies • view on HN

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.

[1] https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html


Replies

velcrovan • today at 12:41 PM

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?

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dofm • today at 1:18 PM

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.

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hnlmorg • today at 1:13 PM

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.

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HumblyTossed • today at 1:40 PM

> 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.

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AuthorizedCust • today at 1:31 PM

TBL’s vision is the starting point, not a straitjacket.

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masswerk • today at 12:46 PM

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.

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James_K • today at 1:42 PM

The idea of printing out one of those documents does not conflict with this.

criddell • today at 12:38 PM

Don Quixote, is that you?