It's the job of the guys back at DominoPower HQ, with the ZENPRESS rendering machine, to create the Web pages that you're reading. Within reason, I don't care how the words appear; I just want them to appear (largely) in the order I wrote them, at the whim of the editor's electronic blue pencil.

I write in a Notes Rich Text field. I write words, sentences and paragraphs. I don't write in pages, because writing isn't about pages. Pages are an artifact of history; when words appeared on paper, they were broken up into pages because that's how paper came, and how paper could be made into books (ever tried reading old-fashioned galley proofs?) I don't actually know, and don't really care, how these words will be broken up for display.

Now, there is another set of arguments about how and why DominoPower goes about breaking my article into virtual pages, but I suspect that has more to do with speed of display and getting the browser window refreshed and another advert on to your screen than anything else. Those pagination decisions are part of the publishing process, they aren't mine. I'm not writing for paper, I don't care. [The pagination was designed in ZENPRESS primarily so you can bookmark long articles, like this one, if you don't want to read it all in one sitting. When we first started designing ZENPRESS, we found that reading long articles in one sitting wasn't always possible and the only way to save where you were was with bookmarks, which required "pages". -- DG]

Let's look at Word
Now start up Word, and you see that it's entirely encapsulated within the concept of pages. It starts up in portrait orientation, too, which means that grey band down each side of the white bit is wasted screen real estate, limiting how much of the screen and how much of your "document" you can see and use at once. I'm sure it starts with a default page in portrait because we tend to read paper in portrait form, but that's exactly my point.

From the moment you start up Word, it's limiting you by the artificial constraint of paper, even if you're actually writing something that will never actually hit a piece of paper. It actually works against using the computer as a communication tool by forcing you straight into a page-oriented mindset. It's just using the computer as a typewriter. A very fancy typewriter, I grant you, but a typewriter none the less.

It even needs to know what printer you aim to use so that it can make automatic pagination decisions for you, and it then starts off by formatting its virtual page to match what that printer might do. It even encapsulates the paper size into the document, which is a different problem; the one that we Europeans who print on A4 know only too well--the printer wants you to load Letter paper, which we don't use. That also means your Word document may well appear differently on my screen than on yours, merely because I have a different printer than you. How asinine is that?

Look more closely at this article. It starts on page 1, right at the top. Now I grant you, you can do that with Word, but just how many Word documents pass through your computer, or do you write, that actually don't start until you get to page 5?