I politely disagree. What does Tim Berners Lee’s opinion of anything have to do with anything? What use is Latex when I want a readable hardcopy of a web page?

The original design of the WWW has morphed a dozen times between what he built and what we have today. And while I don’t love every innovation, there are plenty of things we take for granted today that wasn’t possibly with HTML1, such as banking apps.

So I don’t think there’s much merit arguing about what doesn’t exist any longer.

The biggest problem is that we went to mobile-first design along with a horrible split between backend and frontend functionality. If you hit view source on a lot of sites these days a page will be just a stub for calling javascript that actually puts the html on the page. It's not so much a function of hiding what the site does as it is web developers are afraid to write html and instead punt that into their javascript framework-of-frameworks.

> The entire issue we have today is that we have blurred both the navigable and the printable concepts.

I politely disagree, the problem is we have made websites a javascript hellscape with all that original intent broken by design.

>I politely disagree. The original intent Tim Berners Lee had [1] was to create a navigable way of finding documents and information. Not printable.

And I politely disagree right back. My particular problem with this has to do with purchasing. When I make a purchase at work, I need something I can attach to a purchase request as a quote. Note that this is often not a formal quote, but rather evidence of what whatever I want to buy will cost.

A simple way to do this is to print a shopping cart to PDF and attach that to the PR. Some web sites do this just fine and others do it horribly. They should do better.

Not a facetious question, but you don't build websites for a living, I think?

This kind of fairly idealistic thinking is so far from the ordinary web development norm that you have to go past "supporting that version of IE with 0.7% market share" to get to it.

The Web is meant to have links and interactive content and be navigated, sure.

But to expect every author also upload a PDF? I mean, TeX is great for what it is, but there's a reason _the web_ adapted print stylesheets.

Even if (La)TeX (or Typst, or Postscript or anything else) were easy to learn, you're left with maintaining 2 copies or a compilation system which is also a challenge.

TBL’s vision is the starting point, not a straitjacket.

The idea of printing out one of those documents does not conflict with this.

Don Quixote, is that you?

Fun fact: In the early days, website projects were mostly allocated at the top level of an organisation. As top-level officers used to consume the Web in printouts, the print view was also the default customer view and thus of utter importance.