Deth

It’s extremely rare that I need to print something, but today was a case where it made sense. I can’t see well enough to do the crossword geocaching puzzles without getting frustrated, but Molly likes doing them. Those are easier if they’re printed, so I went to do that. First I tried from my phone, and for some reason the preview wanted to print *FIFTEEN pages. Most of them only had one line of text on them. That would be a ridiculous waste of toner and paper, not to mention electricity. Phones are so overly simplified that, it’s difficult to find better ways to do stuff. This is especially the case if you know what you want to do.

For some reason, when I tried again, it was down to five pages. That’s still absurd, but I did print that one. The last page had just one line of text on it. Of course, the text that was printed is microscopic and thin, with loads of white space. I would have thought a bigger site like that would make better use of CSS to make it drop the useless information.

Worse than geocaching.com, though, would be the occasional site that prints ads along with it. Even worse than the ads themselves are, when it prints a large space that is empty and useless and says that there was an ad there. It’s also laughable when there is obvious SEO fluff that’s normally not visible. When I print from my computer, on the rare occasion I do need to print something, I copy and paste the text into an editor and print just that. That’s the one way to get rid of all the useless fluff.

This sort of thing is bound to happen when most of this stuff is created by designers that only know design in their one track mind. They tend to use tons of scripts and other crap. It may look pretty to them but it’s often not very functional.