The Web is my Print Page

Much of the writing I do is aimed at the web and its damn familiar.

They really were very neat and fast!

Beattie, H. S. and R. A. Rahenkamp. "IBM Typewriter
Innovation." IBM J. Res. Develop. Vol. 25, no. 5. Sept. 1981

I'm just old enough to have seen expectations shift from typewriter to word processor. People who were talking about IBM Selectric balls as fantastic technology (and they were) all of a sudden ran into the benefits of a computer. If the Selectric ball had a 100 facets, each representing a new character, the computer had a million options, each representing a whole new method.

Twenty plus years ago, when I was in high school,  I remember a host of word processors and they had mysterious codes that you could type between "escape characters". These wouldn't be seen by your audience, they'd go to the printer.

HTML is the new printer code.

The printer was the last hurrah of the page as a paradigm.

Some people had wide carriage printers or elaborate needs. Some people printed on forms - paper alignment was crucial. At the time this was very complex stuff and most of us understood that the word processor was a miracle for doing so much work for us. Even today this is a core feature of most offices.

Maybe this keyboard could have typed
 a Web Page. It sure had a enough keys.

US Department of Commerce. "Automatic Typographic-Quality
Typesetting Techniques: A State-of-the-Art Review." National
Bureau of Standards Monograph. Vol. 99. April 7, 1967.

Monotype keyboard

Although the page is not going away soon, it is fundamentally different than the web.

Programs like RoboHelp from Adobe and Flare from Madcap are like blogging software on steroids.

As I type this, thankful to the good people at Google, I don't have to care where the margins are. I don't have to enter numbers or codes. I can concentrate on writing. This is the aim for the next generation of word processors. Its just that now the bar has been raised. I can select paper size for a printer but I can also select screen size for a Tablet or IPhone.

I think the reality of authoring web pages for the various newly established formats and the very different needs of a web document are just beginning to percolate.

References

A cool site for information on text

http://www.hello-object.com/