> There seems to be a complete lack of interest in Paged Media support, so if you want your web-page to be printable with nice formatting, you basically need to provide it as a PDF.
These are the two main reasons I think of whenever someone complains that scientific publication should be Web-based instead of PDFs. Browsers are still generally lacking when it comes to proper typesetting.
On the gripping hand, in a century those reconstituted dead trees will still be legible by anyone who can lay hands on them; the likelihood that an interactive presentation from 2019 will be legible to anyone other than a computer archæologist in 2119 is effectively nil.
Heck, there’s a decent chance that it won’t work in a year or two!
Chrome and only Chrome has an include extension, but for security reasons (something about cross-site foo), you can't use it when testing an HTML file on your disk, because you need a hostname to check the same origin policy. You need to put it into a local webserver, which, fortunately, is fairly easy with Python.
Granted, I'm surprised XSLT is supported at all in modern browsers, and who knows how long it will continue to be supported, but it does work now for the basic "menubar at top" use case.
In the early days, when dynamic webpages were processed by something called CGI and even when we started using PHP, this was like 90% of the use case for doing a dynamic webpage. The last 10% might have been some sort of counter.
> I never understood why there wasn't an <include>
> element in HTML, that would just paste the content of
> the linked document. Why wasn't such an element added
> in the late 90's or early 2000?
I don't know, when XInclude has first been ratified (the current, 2nd revision, of the spec is from 2006), but with it, a generic inclusion mechanism exists for XML, therefore also for XHTML.
With XHTML you could (in theory, as said, the spec is there) use XInclude.
<?xml version='1.0'?>
<html xmlns="http:www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
<head>
</head>
<body>
<p>120 MHz is adequate for an average home user.</p>
<xi:include href="disclaimer.xml"/>
</body>
</html>
In my purely HTML github pages I ended up hacking a header into the common CSS file bc that's "included" everywhere.. it's ugly and I don't think you can even put links in it... but it sorta works. If I wanna tweak it then it's all in one file
PS: this is a naiive question from a non-web dev
I think you can disable that check as a command line option. I cannot check it right now since I don't have chrome installed however I think it was --allow-file-access-from-files .
I'm extremely excited by Igalia's work on MathML and glad that the Google Chrome team had given it their preliminary approval, but in the context of criticising Google for working on the "application web" and ignoring the "document web" (for scientists and others), it doesn't change anything[0]. Google is neither doing the work, nor funding it[1], and their contribution until now has mostly (solely?) been to be open about merging it.
[0] not that you explicitly said that it did...
[1] It's funded by the NISO and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Probably a huge tangent, but UnicodeMath [1][2] is at least encodable and (basically) readable just about everywhere UTF-8 (et al) is supported, which is all browsers today, if unfortunately only just a linear presentation by default. I'm surprised there aren't more progressive renderers for it to up-level it to more traditional two-dimensional renders in browsers directly yet (after several years being standardized as a Unicode Technical Note). A cursory glance shows that even MathJax still doesn't seem to support UnicodeMath (at least out of the box), like it does MathML and AsciiMath. (But I think raw UnicodeMath is easier to read than MathML or AsciiMath in a "progressive" fashion from linear to "professional"/two-dimensional rendering. Though that's a personal preference/aesthetic that can get quite subjective.)
[1] http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.1.p...
[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2016/09/07/unicodem...
I have enough experience with PDFs and screen readers that I find this very surprising. Which PDF reader does he use, and does he get most or all of his PDFs from a particular source?
You might try:
word-spacing: -0.1ex;
But good justification also requires hyphenation. And last I looked, browser support was spotty. It did not work on Chromebooks, for example.
Second, because you want to print -- in which case, your artifact ends up in a page.
Third, because a screenful, even if dynamic (based on resolution, etc) is still a kind of a "page" (in HTML parlance, a "viewport"), and you might want to design to take advantage of what fits in one.
I've tried using it for my resume since may about 10 years ago, to make it possible to convert it to PDF with a standard browser, but to this day many of these features aren't fully supported.
That's kinda the main selling point of software like Prince, which has implemented all of this ages ago, but it requires a licence.
Indeed, I am consistently surprised at the document-display features that are still missing from web browsers that are increasingly preoccupied with serving as application runtimes.
The web was originally envisioned as a platform for scientists to share documents, but thanks to Google dropping MathML, there's still no cross-browser, non-kludge way to display math.
Browsers still can't justify text properly. Even with hyphenation (which iirc is still a problem in Chrome), the greedy algorithm used for splitting text across lines still results in too much space between words when justified.
There seems to be a complete lack of interest in Paged Media support, so if you want your web-page to be printable with nice formatting, you basically need to provide it as a PDF.
I've gotten to the point where I'm often happier to read something in-browser as a PDF than as a web-page. Sure, it can't reflow properly, but at least it won't have a 2-inch sticky header and make XHR requests to 10 different domains. My vision-impaired father reports that his text-to-speech software now works better with PDFs than with real web-pages. This is insanity.