I’ve been reading and enjoying Mike Lee’s new blog for a few weeks now; it’s entertaining, smart, and well-written. As I was heading out the door one morning recently, I noticed he’d posting something new: a rather long piece concerning all things economic, called On Selfishness. I wanted to read it, but not right then, and preferably not on a computer screen.

I went to print the page, but opted for a print preview first; one can never be sure how a web page will be printed. Sure enough:

Where is the rest of the essay? Only the first page is printing.

It wasn’t difficult to guess why this was happening — it’s usually the result of content that’s in a box whose position isn’t static. (See Positioning schemes in the CSS specification for more on this element of web design markup.) Mike uses iWeb to publish his site, and the code that iWeb generated floats and absolutely positions blocks of content in order to make everything look nice. iWeb apparently has enough foresight to generate a print stylesheet, but it doesn’t include appropriate countermeasures for the site’s relatively and absolutely positioned boxes.

At first I tried to download the webpage and hack at the CSS to see if I couldn’t produce something better, but everything I tried had no effect. The massive amount of external and inline styles iWeb generates are so tightly wound around one another that it was difficult to tell which element(s) I should be targeting.

I became frustrated enough to stop trying, and ended up copying and pasting the text into another document and printing it out that way.

It’s no secret that iWeb generates some muddy markup — Todd Dominey pointed out the multitude of issues with the first version of iWeb early in 2006. The meta tags for Mike’s blog reveal he’s still running on iWeb ‘06, but, unfortunately, an upgrade to iWeb ‘08 wouldn’t fix the problem — my own tests with iWeb ‘08 reveal that the generated code is much the same, and the printing issue remains.

There are other problems with iWeb’s webpages — the URL for posts is a prime example:

The web development community ignores iWeb for a reason — it flagrantly disregards the clean, refined standards they have long championed. But whether the code is valid or the site adheres to various standards is much less important than it being easy to use in a variety of media. As Mike himself says, “I don’t want this site to be about what a good (or bad) web designer I am. I want it to be about the message, whatever that might be.” So what do I suggest? Personally, I’d like to see Mike’s content on a different blogging platform, because the other solution — an update to iWeb that generates better print stylesheets — may be long in coming.

He’s a busy man, though, and doesn’t have time for a different platform, and that’s certainly understandable. I’d like to suggest a third solution: that we fix iWeb ourselves. Who’s “we?” Well, Mike knows iWeb well and is comfortable with it; perhaps he could take a look at the print stylesheets and tweak things. I’ll even dive back in myself. And of course, there’s our multitude of readers — together we can find a way! “Lazyweb?” Hardly.

Follow Sakuzaku on Twitter. Click here.