[Bryn-gwlad] Geekiness and beauty (was Re: historian info)

[Lucia Digioia]

Tut, Master Daniel. Nobody said a word about "requirements," for
browsers, beauty, or anything else. Furthermore, let us assume that
when I say "printer-beautiful," I mean "printer-beautiful-assuming-a-
standard-page-size-and-commonly-used-print-settings-and-also-that-
color-is-not-a-prerequisite-for-beauty-on-a-printed-page" (I do, but
it's just not euphonious). If a user decides to print a webpage using
a 0.12" left margin and a 5" right margin, you're right--it ain't gonna
be pretty. :-)  I also won't be able to produce a beautiful print from my
Sipix A6 printer, which is designed for use with Palm PDAs and prints
on a roll of thermal paper.

(Aesthetically speaking, the biggest hindrance to achieving "beautiful
pages" from the web is not, IMO, mono vs. color, but rather our inability
to embed fonts into a webpage. But I digress...)

What I can do (with CSS print:media) is ensure that the page you print
will contain a print-formatted top element (logo), type of a reasonable
size, columns of a reasonable width, and graphics that don't get cut off
(again, assuming commonly used settings). They will not contain
material extraneous to the content, like the left-hand navigation bar
that uses up a quarter to a third of the area of most printed webpages.
If you choose to layer your own stylesheet on top, I think I can say with
confidence that it will still be better than about 95% of the web pages
out there (because hardly anyone thinks about designing web pages
for print, much less for print-plus-accessibility).

I am philosophically opposed to *any* form of "printer-friendly page" that
involves making a separate page, be it HTML or PDF. Okay, it's not just
philosophy--it's laziness as well. Separate pages are an okay solution for
a ten-page website but it just doesn't scale. What I'm talking about is the
ability to reformat a page for print without having to rewrite it--perfect 
for a
part-time keeper of a 100+ page website.

And speaking of testing that website--why yes, Master Daniel, I would
indeed love to get feedback from an Opera user! We have two Win boxes,
a Mac, and a Linux laptop, but Opera's not on any of them. It's a browser
known to web designers for its quirky CSS implementation, so it will
probably be a learning experience for me.

For those who wonder, current stats on visits to our website:

IE       64%
Firefox  28%
Safari    6%
Opera     1%
with Netscape, Camino, Konquerer, etc. making up the remainder.

Platforms?

Windows  89%
Mac       8%
Linux     3%

In service, --Lucia

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <tmcd at panix.com>
To: "Barony of Bryn Gwlad" <bryn-gwlad at lists.ansteorra.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2007 11:23 PM
Subject: Re: [Bryn-gwlad] historian info


> On Thu, 10 May 2007, Lucia Digioia <vs_bryngwlad at ansteorra.org> wrote:
>> Anyway, one of the changes in the works is to make every page not
>> just printer-friendly but printer-beautiful. Ideally, you will be
>> able to print out a perfectly formatted sheet from every page on the
>> web--no cut-off graphics or funny word-wrap issues. Thus, any page
>> on the web should be usable as a handout.
>
> Going geeky here, possibly spawning a geeky thread:
>
> That's impossible with HTML.  You can't control a browser.
>
> You may be able to do it if you're willing to generate Adobe PDF
> files.  But that requires that the recipient have Adobe Acrobat Reader
> of whatever version, and Adobe has lagged in their support for some
> systems (Linux, for example).  It also assumes that the printer won't
> bollox things up.  The College of Heralds has had problems with PDF
> submission forms: by default, with the current setup, Acrobat Reader
> mistakenly shrinks the PDF so that it'll fit onto the sheet, reducing
> the shield dimensions and throwing off scanning templates.  Also, PDF
> files tend to be somewhat or much larger than text, and some of us are
> still using dialup.  Also, I know that screen readers and screen
> enlargers exist for HTML, but I don't know about PDF.
>
> I can also imagine color images being used.  It's not possible for my
> black-and-white inkjet printer to do anything "beautiful" with them.
>
> As a general philosophical point, I dislike sites that assume or
> require that the user use such-and-so software, or configuration, or
> printers.  ("Best viewed in Internet Explorer 5 on a 800x600 monitor."
> and such.)
>
> So, while it's worthy to consider how a page is likely to be viewed,
> I suggest that no hard assumptions should be made and that
> "printer-beautiful" should not be a _requirement_ and should not
> unduly burden anyone.
>
> I'm willing to evaluate how pages look ... in Opera, on Linux, using
> my standard personal stylesheet for larger text and less glare.
>
> the only webs Danyell de Linccolne knows about are from spiders
> -- 
> Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: tmcd at panix.com