In My Experience... | Deep linking to printer formatted pages. (1813)

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Deep linking to printer formatted pages.
[ Posted by Dan on June 10, 2002 | 3 Comments ]

Quite a few site have caught on to the idea that a printer friendly version of a given page is a nice, user-centric thing to provide. After all, it helps/enables the consumer to enjoy content in a nice, eye friendly, familiar and random access format (paper!). However, I think deep linking (the act of linking directly to a page behind a welcome screen on a given site) to these printer pages might be a bad idea. MacNN did this recently by linking to a Forbes article.

It was established two years ago that deep linking is legal (beyond the fact that it the very basis of this thing we call the web). The original argument against deep linking was that one company could be hurting another by leading a user directly to some content or service without the user going thru the advertising laden pages between the home page and the payoff page. I thought that was b.s. when I first heard it because most/all pages from commercial web sites are drowning in adverts anyway.

The advent of printer pages directly linked to by a third party completely denies the host of the content of any possible revenue from that page view. If that practice becomes truly systemic, one of two things will happen; another law suit will arise (not likely due to a precedent) or, more likely, printer friendly pages will eventually contain more adverts.

This would be easy enough to stop. Simply have the page set a cookie that says "viewed normally", which then allows you to go to the printer friendly version. Linking directly to the printer one would simply result in showing the real one, after which the person can click the link to the ad-free version.

-Posted by Eric Savage on June 11, 2002 12:05 AM

I've already encountered printer pages with ads, and I don't see why this wouldn't continue. Think of the potential marketing angle for that: it's like getting a print ad AND a web ad for the price of just the latter!

-Posted by Paul on June 11, 2002 08:58 AM

I've also seen print-friendly pages where the link to the printer-friendly version isn't a link at all, but a form submit widget ... and submission takes the visitor to a generic print page script with no url parameters appended to the url (the script knows which article to display because the form included a hidden field(s) with article-specific identifying info. The result is an unbookmarkable print-friendly page. Blah

-Posted by brian on June 16, 2002 11:11 AM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).