RE: Controlling page breaks in printouts

> -- Unless this BLOCK attribute somehow manipulates the actualy display of
> the data I'm not sure it should be considered as part of the standard.

HTML is intended to present data in a display-independent way, for 
formatting as appropriate for the output device in question. On a screen, 
an (infinitely large) scrolling pane is fine, but I don't think this 
should exclude the possibility of printing onto (letter-sized) sheets of 
paper. I am currently at the Inet'96 workshop for developing countries; 
having materials which can be taken home in printed form is a huge 
benefit for the many people who don't yet have full connectivity.

Besides, I like the idea of using HTML for writing printed documents 
because they are platform-independent, and more importantly, 
Microsoft-independent :-)

> Tables could a be a real problem, for many of them
> extend well past one page

If a block is larger than a page, it would start on a fresh page and then
would obviously have to be broken. However for a table you probably want
to ensure just that individual rows of the table are not broken. Perhaps
this is something that browsers should do anyway when printing tables? If
not, you could <BLOCK>..</BLOCK> each row. Incidentally, I don't think
this is necessarily a good name for the tag, but I haven't thought of a
better one yet. 

> if browsers supported such tags as BLOCK
> for printing only, it would'nt make much difference to display if you
> threw them in or not. 

Being able to mark sections of text as intended for viewing together 
could be useful in other contexts - when flooding text into 
frames/columns for example.

> Exactly how does one print out a Java applet or embedded movie?

If someone makes a web browser which filters these out entirely, I shall 
be a happy person :-)

Brian.

Received on Friday, 21 June 1996 12:19:37 UTC