A Plea To Web Designers

If you’re going to produce a print CSS file for your blog entries (nicely formatting a print version, and removing unnecessary page furniture), please include the comments!
The two guiltiest candidates that I’ve come across – i.e. blogs that I read but don’t conform – are the BBC’s, and those of Guardian Unlimited. If you try to print the entry out, you’ll only get the initial authored piece, and none of the comments below. Yet as often as not, the blog is positively inviting comments, and part of the raison d’etre of having a blog is to allow commenting. Comments very often drive the conversation forward, and are often as important as the original entry.
But I’m not able to print those comments out! Try as I might, short of using a really old browser that ignores CSS code, I’m left to copy and paste comments into a word processor and print from there. I can’t tell you how frustrating that is. if someone knows how to disable CSS in Firefox that’d at least be a workaround, but personally I consider it poor design that I can’t print comments.
Obviously I know that I shouldn’t be killing more trees than need be by unnecessarily printing things out, but the average blog entry and associated comments makes for a far better read than the dreadful free “newspapers” handed out by London tube stations for the commute home.


Posted

in

Tags: