> And in large part i fear we get this because the people in charge are hell bent on recreating printed media in electronic form.
I agree. I see the conflict between designers and users to be one of the primary reasons for the current state of the web.
The conflict is about who gets to control how the content looks. The web was intended for users to have that control. The browser is your "user agent", you get to decide what and how gets fetched and displayed. The designers, on the other hand, want to treat webpages as color magazines - they want to have full control over what's shown on your screen, as for them the form is just as important as the actual content. They would happily serve you the web page as a PDF, if they could get away with it.
Personally, I'm firmly in the "user gets to control" camp, but the market prefers the "designers get to control" camp. So here we are, with web browsers continuously removing the ability to control anything, and the HTML/CSS accruing more and more layout control tools.
I agree. I see the conflict between designers and users to be one of the primary reasons for the current state of the web.
The conflict is about who gets to control how the content looks. The web was intended for users to have that control. The browser is your "user agent", you get to decide what and how gets fetched and displayed. The designers, on the other hand, want to treat webpages as color magazines - they want to have full control over what's shown on your screen, as for them the form is just as important as the actual content. They would happily serve you the web page as a PDF, if they could get away with it.
Personally, I'm firmly in the "user gets to control" camp, but the market prefers the "designers get to control" camp. So here we are, with web browsers continuously removing the ability to control anything, and the HTML/CSS accruing more and more layout control tools.