RE: Controlling page breaks in printouts

Guys, please don't forget to properly attribute what you are quoting,
otherwise it gets confusing very quickly.

On Fri, 21 Jun 1996 09:19:30 -0700 (PDT), Brian Candler <brian@psg.com> wrote:
> HTML is intended to present data in a display-independent way, for 
> formatting as appropriate for the output device in question.

Exactly. Any browser that does not include proper widow and orphan
control on printout is seriously broken. Unfortunately, it appears that
most of todays browsers are broken in this way (please do write Netscape
and Microsoft and tell them that this bothers you; it appears that these
companies have to be told even the most obvious things).

> On Fri, 21 Jun 1996 08:57:20 -0600, "Imagination's End" <I.End@bigpic.com> wrote:
> > 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.

You might want to check out the latest table specs. They contain
provisions for dealing with tables that don't fit on a screen full or
need to be broken across pages.

> > 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.

No need for a separate BLOCK element. There are already a number of
elements in HTML that act as blocks: DIV, H1-H6, P, TABLE, etc. All
that is necessary is to be able to specify in a style sheet how likely
a page break is supposed to be before, within, and after a block. For
example, one would want to prohibit page breaks within and after
headers and slightly encourage them before headers.

> > 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 :-)

How about printing the alternate text?

Marcus E. Hennecke
marcush@crc.ricoh.com        http://www.crc.ricoh.com/~marcush/

Received on Friday, 21 June 1996 15:14:05 UTC