Re: [CSS3] Generated content: environment variables

Ludger Bünger wrote:
> Because some do like to have this info in their printouts and others do 
> not?

Some _users_ or some _authors_?

For the user, UAs typically provide a preference UI to control this sort of thing.

For the author, I don't see why what they like matters; the user is the one 
who's ending up with the printout.

> To be more precise: it depends upon the scenario where you like to have 
> this upon your documents.

So you're talking about the author.  As I said above, I don't see any good 
reasons for this to be under author control.  If the user wants to have all 
their printouts date-stamped, then they should be that way.

> A standard scenario for our CSS based printing solution are companies 
> creating technical documentation from HTML.
> If the documentation is for company internal usage only, you do like to 
> have this info, esp. the the location, where to find the most recent 
> version.
> 
> However at the very moment where the document is published upon a 
> website for external retrieval you *do not* want to have it data anymore 
> by company policy.

I'm not sure I follow this.  If I go to this website and print out the technical 
documentation, I want my browser to put the place I got it from on the printout. 
  What does company policy have to do with this?  We're talking about things 
that are on the public Web, right?

> Actually exactly this was the *very first* feature request from our 
> customers: configurable addition of time, date and location of a 
> document in page margin areas.

Configurable by the author at the expense of the user?  Or configurable by the 
author in addition to whatever information the user wants to see there?

> So there *is* a real life demand to this...

Sure.  There's also real life demand for tracking all user actions on the Web, 
for preventing users from printing web pages, for preventing users from copying 
the source of web pages, for preventing users from saving web pages, for 
preventing users from navigating away from a site.

Does that mean that web standards should introduce functionality that 
facilitates all such abusive actions?  No.

-Boris

Received on Friday, 2 November 2007 16:21:29 UTC