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Originally Posted by BobR
That whole issue of who controls how content is handled, and how much it can be controlled has a lot to do with the usability and cost of content in the future. I have concerns that with future web technologies (maybe not even in Web2.0, but especially Web 3.0 and beyond), it won't be possible to find printer friendly versions of sites for mobile clipping. We may find in the future that you can't navigate directly to a printer friendly page, or even directly navigate to a particular page within a site at all. Web sites will have the technology eventually to control completely the navigation through their content and what's seen on the page.
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I'm completely against anyone controlling how any content is viewed. As long as whatever device one wants to use to view it can handle (or convert) the format the content is currently in, someone should be free to do what they want with the content (provided it doesn't break copyright laws, the content's licence, or similar concerns).
For example, if content is provided as aPDF, then as long as the way the user wishes to view the content can view PDFs, or convert from PDFs to another format, then they should be able to.
In other words, I think the only restriction on who-view-what-and-how should be technology barriers, such as the example I gave with converting formats from one to another.
And as a hint for anyone currently doing web design... CSS media types work wonders. No need for a separate "print" view. Just use the print media type, with a stylesheet that simplifies the colours, removes anything unnecessary (display: none !important; ), and perhaps streamlines the layout to be more suitable for a sheet of paper. Works in most browsers I've tested (I have
not tested it in IE, however).
There's also a handheld media type, but I can't test what mobile browsers follow it or not. The only one I've tested, Netfront on a Clie, doesn't support it. So it's not a reliable way of doing mobile design, as far as I know.