WSJ: Unclear on the meaning of ‘format for printing’

Why would you embed a video in a Web page that’s been reformatted for printing? You need rich text, certainly. Ads and graphics, yes, that makes sense too.

How about an embedded video playback window? That’s just stupid. But that’s what The Wall Street Journal does.

I acme across an interesting article on wsj.com about Wintel’s challenge to Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative. (The OLPC laptop uses AMD chips and runs Linux, so both Intel and Microsoft have an understandably vested interest in derailing the project, such as with the Intel Classmate device.)

As I prefer to do for any article that’s more than a couple of screens long, I decided to print the article so I could read it on my office’s sofa, perhaps with a nice fresh cappuccino.

Like many media sites, wsj.com offers a “Format for Printing” option. Click – and there’s the “A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions” article, nicely reformatted — except for the astonishing video playback box (see screen capture – click to open it full size). The playback window shows up on the printout.

Talk about being unclear on the concept!