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

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?

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.

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 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.

The biggest problem is that we went to mobile-first design along with a horrible split between backend and frontend functionality. If you hit view source on a lot of sites these days a page will be just a stub for calling javascript that actually puts the html on the page. It's not so much a function of hiding what the site does as it is web developers are afraid to write html and instead punt that into their javascript framework-of-frameworks.

>I politely disagree. The original intent Tim Berners Lee had [1] was to create a navigable way of finding documents and information. Not printable.

And I politely disagree right back. My particular problem with this has to do with purchasing. When I make a purchase at work, I need something I can attach to a purchase request as a quote. Note that this is often not a formal quote, but rather evidence of what whatever I want to buy will cost.

A simple way to do this is to print a shopping cart to PDF and attach that to the PR. Some web sites do this just fine and others do it horribly. They should do better.

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?