Re: Print=Yes

Barry Johnson (dynis@winternet.com)
Fri, 28 Apr 1995 01:33:41 +0500


Lantz Rowland <LantzR@physio-control.com> awoke me from my dogmatic slumber
by mentioning:

>I often print out web documents to read on the bus. That started me
>watching for when a printed document would loose information that I
>intended to be available my readers as well noticing that type of loss
>in other documents.
> [lantz proceeds to describe how pages print now, and how they should ideally
> print, which is quite sensible]
>I believe that this should be done by using the class attribute (unlike
>my example), however I am not sure if that can work. The HTML tag has
>the urn and dtd version for the document and currently the class
>attribute is for the role of the document. The Title, Base, Style,
>and Meta elements as well as <A> can contain information of this type
>but those elements have %uri and do not have the %attr entity that
>contains the class attribute.

My thought with this would be that browsers would be in a better position
to do this than adding something via HTML. I think if browser had a
preference such as

( ) Ignore references
( ) Print references inline
(*) Print references as footnotes
( ) Expand references inline [n] levels deep

The last preference is a potentially scary thought but it would be fairly
useful. (Say you want a hardcopy of some documentation available only in
linked HTML, 1 page per section. Insted of a retreive/load/print cycle, you
simply can print the highest level, walk away, and let your browser do the
work.)

Just my $.02

--Barry

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry Johnson (612) 593-5000
Dynamic Information Systems FAX: (612) 593-5081
5402 Parkdale Drive, Suite 111 CIS: 76640,2520
Minneapolis, MN 55416-1609 dynis@winternet.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------