censored formfeeds

dba@althingi.is
Thu, 29 Jun 1995 23:32:57 GMT

I recently fetsched:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/html/draft-ietf-html-specv3-00.txt.gz
"HyperText Markup Language Specification Version 3.0",
Dave Raggett, 28 Mar 1995.
Text version (gzip'd)

it is good to have all the text in one file and be able
to search for terms in the draft
it is plaintext in pages with headers and pagenumbers
which makes it possible to refer to pages in the document
it is fine with me
but when it is printed out there is no guaranty that the
page header does not end up in the middle of the page
there is something wrong here
I think strongly that formfeeds in at the least plaintext
and pre should not be ignored when it comes to printing
I think that casting them out is simply not beeing nice

plaintext and pre is not real hypertext so it does not
break any philosophy to let formfeed have its usual
primitive function there

I have found it hard to comprehend the recent discussion
about columns
HTML is for freefloating text only which does not have
the higher structure of pages and columns
in my mind pages come first and it is impossible to discuss
columns and bypass pages

I have been asking for some page control - some way to
mark in the document feasible page layout to pass to the printing
program which would not be censored on the way
it would not have anything to do with the appearance on screen
this was asking for too much
but now people are asking for column layout on the screen
I am puzzled

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