printing HTML

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Thu Apr 9 02:05:53 UTC 1998


Ted K. writes: 

 > One problem with html is that you have no control over horizontal
 > spacing.  Tabs are not supported.  Putting in more than one space
 > character does not influence horizontal spacing.
 > 
 > Other than that, html is a 'universal' printing format.  I've
 > noticed some gif support in the system.  I would like to see us
 > expand this capability to allow any window to dump an image of
 > itself on the disk as a legal html file.  An added benefit is that
 > one can make web pages by 'printing' and moving the files to your
 > web server.


I can't resist one of my favorite rants. 

With HTML it's even "worse" than this.  Take any particular tag, and
you really don't know just how it will render on a random user's
browser.  For instance, header tags might come out numbered, or
bold-faced, or enlarged, or centered, or maybe none of the above.
<ul> might number its "unordered" list, and <ol> might use letters
instead of numbers.  You just don't know.


If you *really* wants to control layout, you should use something like
Postscript or RTF or TeX or Word, systems seriously designed for
describing the appearance of a document in addition to its textual
content.

HTML is for *content* markup.


Lex





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list