On Dec 1, 2005, at 12:16 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
Also, the vast majority of printers in use don't natively support
printing of utf-8, thus forcing users to layer each of their computer
systems with more and more buggy cruft just to do simple tasks like
printing plain text. Perhaps those are buggy also?
Uh, I print UTF-8 documents all the time. Normally I do it from the
app in which I'm viewing them (word processor, web browser, RSS
reader, xml editor, whatever).
These days, your best bet for getting utf-8 files to print is to use a
web browser's print command, which is doable but can be fairly
cumbersome as compared to typing a simple "lpr" command.
Hmm; control-P, enter.
Unfortunately,
most web browsers fail to preserve page breaks (FF characters) when
printing flat text files, which makes the resulting documents hard to
read.
Turn this around; when printing HTML, the browser inserts appropriate
page breaks depending on the combination of font, styling, and paper
size that's in effect. This has the effect that when you're arguing
about some text, you have to say "Look at 5.2.1.3, 2nd para" rather
than "Look at page 13, 2nd para". It's not clear that this is any
better or worse.
HTML with utf-8 actually displays and prints more portably than plain
text with utf-8, though it's not clear how many browsers support the
style sheet extensions enough to print page breaks in the right
places.
Given the above, I agree with the first half of the sentence. In
fact, I am sitting behind a desk on which there's a macintosh and an
Ubuntu linux box, and I wouldn't really know how to print plain-ASCII
text on either of them, and when I've tried, the page breaks usually
come out wrong. On either of them, I can and do print HTML
effortlessly and with excellent results.
Also, HTML is still somewhat of a moving target and it is
somewhat unclear whether any particular subset of HTML that is used
today will still be effectively presented 10-20 years from now.
I think it is crystal clear that if you stick to HTML4 Strict or
Transitional, that has an excellent chance of survival at least for
decades.
The
biggest problems with HTML are (a) no way to include images in the
document without external links (yes I know about MHTML but it's
not as
widely supported); (b) difficulty in finding authoring tools that will
produce output in a subset of HTML that we define; (c) avoiding
the temptation to make the documents pretty rather than readable.
I grant problem (a). (b) and (c) can be solved using automated tools
and compulsory stylesheets (or by using xml2rfc).
It's hard to escape the conclusion that we're trying very hard to make
our document processing much more complex for a very marginal gain.
There are two large populations for whom the gain is not "marginal".
1. Those, like me, who can't print ASCII files easily
2. Those whose names can't be spelled properly in ASCII.
I claim that both those groups either already do, or will soon,
constitute large majorities of the interested population. -Tim
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