[LINK] Environmental impact of web versus print

[Tom Worthington]

At 10:22 AM 9/26/2006, Howard Lowndes wrote:
>Richard Chirgwin wrote:
>>Tom Worthington wrote:
>>>... producing documents in smaller pieces might help. ...
>>A browser that could parse Web pages correctly as A4 (or 
>>US  Letter) page size would also be very nice, so that if I only 
>>want to print the stuff at the top (and not 50 pages of comment) I can do so!
>
>Combine that with media specific CSS, so that the printed 
>presentation is minus the ads and fluff. ...

Yes, I usually include a print style sheet which omits the 
interactive menus and reformats the text to fill the page. This is 
easy enough to do with alternate style sheets 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2006/wd/index.shtml#udf>.

But some people get confused when what is printed doesn't look 
exactly the same as it did on the screen. Also it only saves a small 
amount of paper, if you are just reformatting the same content. You 
might only save 25% of the paper by reformatting the content.

What I had in mind was encouraging people to print as little as 
possible, by presenting them with the summary first. In this way they 
might just print a one page summary instead of a 100 page document.

One way to encourage this would be to put the link for the full 
document at the bottom of the web page with the summary on it, rather 
than at the top of the page. The link will then be "below the fold" 
not visible on the first screen full of information. To get to the 
link the user would have to scroll down through the summary. There is 
therefore a chance they will be happy with the summary and not click 
on the link.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml