Any “Reader View” browser feature or extension neutralizes this bit of cleverness - and people who print regularly often use them for a less cluttered page.
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I used to teach web design at a university - that was on an “example” page in the stylesheets section of the class website, under the category of “things that are possible, that you shouldn’t do”. Mostly the section was about making your formatting look right and make sense in different media, for example the course website had “menu” buttons, and a large-ish header at the top of the page, which was replaced in printouts with a smaller header, and no “menu” button - you can’t click on paper anyways. This was partly because the course website was also the course textbook (web design changes too fast - any textbook on it is out of date by the time it hits the shelves) and the students were in the habit of printing the whole thing out.
About a year after I put that example in as a “thing you shouldn’t do”, it got changed into “thing that used to be a problem, but more recent browsers prevent it from working - still don’t do it though”.
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But why?
I remember when I did eCommerce sites, I would hide the menu, footer, header, etc so that only the product content would print out should they need it.
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I do, whenever I need to follow some instructions for motorcycle repair and don’t want to have my tablet lying around in a greasy environment where heavy tools might get dropped on it.
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That’s using the code as intended, not some form of misguided copy protection.
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Someone is doing the internet wrong.
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If you read the “article” it’s some kind of moral vendetta against people who live life differently than the author with the thinnest foil of feigned environmental concern sprayed over it.
I feel like I should print it out just to spite him really.
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This is a real dick move. I’ve printed every web page to PDF that I’ve ever been interested in, or read, since 2000… I have a full archive of everything, and can grep for data to my hearts content without having to even be connected to the Internet … its a far better system than Bookmarks, and allows for constant reference to material that I find interesting enough to go to the effort to print.
This AOL’ification of the Web must be resisted by those who feel they have the ‘right’ to control what people view and how they deal with the content they publish. You should know better - printed copies of your site is doing YOU a favour, bitches.
Sorry, if you put it on the web - its in the public domain. Sites that do this don’t get re-visited.
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YES! - I have similar students. That is, I have students who are happy that there’s federal assistance to have a shitty cellphone with a shitty dataplan, but they’re sad that their home is not near enough to a tower that they can get materials. So, yeah, they like to save stuff when they’re at the public library wifi or whatever. And I like to make PDFs from web pages when I can, to save them a step.
And I have a colleague who is neuro-atypical who freaks out about working with PDFs, so they print things and write on them. Hell, sometimes I do that because it can help to have it in a different mode. Not to mention that sometimes I am sick to death of sitting in front of a screen, and I want to work at a table outside. Does this make me a monster or a plagiarist?
And, really, “plagiarist”? Plagiarists aren’t bothered about printing.
This post and its advice is just bizarre.
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I print webpages to pdf all the time to place them in my digital commonplace book. Please don’t be an asshole and do this.
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I used to print out documents, go to a nearby area of public land/nature reserve, and read them there while making notes on the paper. If I got too stressed and my dyslexia started making too hard to read I would just stop reading and watch the wildlife for a while. It does help me.
I am sure that if this ablist practice takes off then someone will make browser plugins that disable it. I used to have ones that would allow copy and paste when it became popular to block that.
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It’s a real arms race. Eventually the makers of the paywall catch on and tweak their java script. I used to read the daily beast insider through the source code, though.
A lot of webpages get saved as pdf to my devonthink databases-- a recipe here, a bibliography there. Mostly, though, it’s journal articles that are already nicely formatted as pdf files.
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Block that person’s site at the router, problem solved!
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Well, no, obviously not. But I agree with the dick move part.
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Try that defence in court and you will be taken as seriously as a sovereign citizen.
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IIRC, you can just go into the Inspector dashboard and also manually edit out the @media CSS.
Check and mate.
Also - per the page linked:
Update! It’s fair to say no one liked this idea - so I’ve reverted it. Thanks for all the feedback
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We’ve come a long way since the days of reconfiguring the right mouse button to
alert("Put that back right now, you filthy image pirate!");
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Not to the printer ink people, obviously.
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Would you like to? Should someone be arranging it?
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It’s obnoxious how browsers would support an anti-user feature like this but there are more. Isn’t it crazy how, even after setting the browser to not allow pop-ups, and installing pop-up blockers, the browser will STILL open pop-ups if a web page has some clever way to command it? It’s like the browser programmers doggedly want to leave enabled the block of code which actually commands a new window be created and throw content into it, and only do some mediocre filtering of some of the commands which utilize this code.
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