With (the first part of) this statement you've eloquently begun a
counterargument to your own complaints. Viewing a document on the
screen is fundamentally different from printing it on paper.
Onscreen, a document is really just one page. Since most monitors are
not arbitrarily tall (at least not the ones we've got around NCSA ;-),
windowing is a mechanism for viewing a really tall document a bit at a
time, without the restriction that you have to take it in discrete 11"
(sorry, A4ers) chunks. Sure there's a direct analogy between the
printed-page meta-information and window meta-information, but the
higher intelligence of the onscreen display mechanism makes things
different.
That said, there is obvious utility in being able to keep parts of the
document visible in your window while other parts move in and out.
(Table headers and footers were your example; tables of contents or
other navigation aids are others.) HTML is moving in the direction of
having more of these capabilities. (E.g., see <banner> and <link
rel=various-stuff> in the current 3.0 draft.) Browsers will follow,
especially if you hound browser-developers (politely, of course ;-).
> p.s. Are sigs un-cool or do you just all know each other?
Neither. I think it's just that some people don't bother with them.
mag