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Eliminating ‘widows’ from webpage printouts |
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Score
81%
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15 votes,
Feasibility
100%
Originality
100%
Humour
0% |
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No doubt this has been decried and then explored, but I wonder what, if any, solutions have been advanced for the vast waste of paper that is occasioned by those last pages of minimal content that so often occur when printing out a webpage?
It seems to me that some kind of widely distributed application could be propounded that would automatically not print the last part of any webpage when that content would appear on an additional piece of paper and when the amount of that content is under a certain amount of vertical space, or if the content is a footer. Alternately, the techno-fix might be to automatically compress the last amount of content so that it is squeezed onto the bottom of the previous and now-the-last-page.
‘A defined amount of expendable material’
The amount of material that would be defined as expendable, or compressible, would be defined by a default value, which users could redefine to include more material (eco-minded users) or less material (forest-destroying persnickety types who don’t want to miss a single letter or piece of punctuation).
A more fundamental solution might be to include some kind of ‘universal page break’ indicator into webpage-authoring software that would allow website designers and webmasters to assure up-front that printouts of their sites’ webpages will produce no or minimal numbers of these ‘widow pages.’
Meanwhile, here’s my low-tech proposed solution:
The bottom line of every webpage on environmentally-minded websites would be a small but boldfaced strong suggestion to ‘REUSE OR RECYCLE THIS LAST PAGE IF IT DOESN’T ADD ANYTHING IMPORTANT TO THE PRINTOUT!’ or some such statement.
• Greg Wright (greg@newciv.org) is the founder of Wright Thinking, and the winner of a Social Inventions award for his idea for a Global Suggestion Box, which became the Global Ideas Bank.
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