Companies need to check to see if there’s already a solution before solving problems. The new wheel is Tabblo, a slick web based technology for internet users to print blogs, images on flickr, and other web sites. Whoo-hoo now I can print web pages… Hmmm I don’t remember not being able to print web pages before. Well here’s the story.
Tabblo decided that using the standards based system of cascading style sheets for print media wasn’t good enough. I quote:
The recipe is like a Print CSS file — it identifies the content on the page which should be printed
So here it is, they created their own client side JavaScript widget that reads a recipe that specifies which areas of a page should be printed. Then sends those elements back to the server and mashes them into these templates for printing. Hmmm.
There are several problems with this very convoluted system:
- There is an existing solution that is standards compliant, CSS
- JavaScript can be turned off, oops, now it doesn’t work, and the user is pissed off
- The code produced is invalid, it can’t pass for valid HTML, or XHMTL
- Instead of using the existing page design and CSS for the print, it uses some other, server side format, why?
- I have to now learn some new whacked out, propriatary code base just to print? I’m busy enough already
Thanks for turning back the tide of progress and sending the web back to 1997. What a waste.