I am having a problem related to CSS. (I suppose we all have a problem related to CSS, but this is a printing kind of problem rather than a cartels-and-censorship kind of problem.)
So perhaps I should say that I'm having a browser problem. I should probably submit this in Bugzilla, but maybe I have readers who can help here.
Suppose you have the following HTML document:
<html>
<head>
<title>simple css background</title>
<style type="text/css" media="all">
.lorem {
background-image: url("http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/23/CiceroBust.jpg");
};
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p class="lorem">
Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain.
Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain.
Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain.
Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain.
</p>
</body>
<html>
Some people will observe that the background image of Cicero shows up on the screen but not in the printed version or even in Print Preview, notwithstanding the media="all" attribute.
"Aha!", says the standard advice. "You just need to enable 'Print Background (colors & images)' in your Page Setup dialog!"
This done, the background image of Cicero now shows up perfectly in Print Preview. However, it still doesn't print.
Indeed, printing to a PostScript file makes it very clear that the CSS background image does not print at all, even with media="print". But it does consistently show up in Print Preview, so that Print Preview and the actual print output are consistently different from one another.
Here is what Print Preview looks like after turning on "Print Background (colors & images)":
And here is what the actual printed output looks like immediately afterward:
Note that the background image is completely absent from the printed output even though it is present in the preview.
I have this problem with Firefox 1.0 and also with Mozilla 1.7.
Right after the People v. Barlow hearing, danah boyd was talking about her observations of body language (and other subtextual aspects) in the hearing. I had thought about this very little, since I was concentrating on things like whether or not the judge had actually granted any Federal objections based on alleged privilege -- which would determine whether that legal issue would be argued on appeal. In an imperfect sense, I was thinking about the hearing as if I were reading the transcript, or at least as if I were trying to imagine reading the transcript. Which issues were raised? Which objections were accepted? After all, that's all an appellate court is going to get; it's against the rules to make an audio or video recording of the trial. The California Court of Appeal is going to end up with a bunch of words on paper -- "Objection, relevance." -- "Sustained." No indication of what the judge was thinking or feeling or what led him to that.
It's clear that danah perceived things differently -- one might say that she was more concerned with what was going on socially (which I believe probably affords a better prediction of the ultimate outcome than I and many other people might expect) or interpersonally. For instance, danah says that "[a]s an ethnographer, it was brutally painful to watch the body performance of each side show their values more deeply than anything that came out of their mouths." Now she's written up some of her observations; you can compare them with my observations. A typical danah observation:
The judge gave me that warm and fuzzy feeling. He clearly sympathized with Barlow, but he was also dealing with conflicted feelings about the recent laws that have come down - his sarcastic tone signaled that he felt very burdened by what was happening, but his judicial manner also made it clear that he felt it was his responsibility to follow the letter of the law, even those to which he was opposed.
The attorneys were caricatures of themselves. The federal attorneys had a hard-edged, no-smile Yale/Harvard rigidity that was stunningly performed. Kafka would have been proud. Milgram at its best. Barlow's attorney was most distinctly an ACLU type with long hair, funky glasses, curved shoulders and a revolutionary demeanor that signaled that he believed in the cause. The Cause.
A typical Seth observation, for contrast:
The defense then argued that Ms. Ramos could not really have believed that the ibuprofen bottle in question contained an improved explosive device, because she had testified that, on removing it from Barlow's bag, she became suspicious of it, then shook it, and then opened it. These actions were the most dangerous actions she could possibly have taken if she really believed that the bottle might contain explosives (as she testified) -- they were the actions most likely to get her and her co-workers killed. Therefore, she must actually have believed that the bottle contained drugs (not what she was searching for) rather than explosives.
I probably get closest to danah's observational style in my fragmentary questions about what Sandra Ramos, the security screener whose actions were challenged and examined and re-examined at the hearing, thought about the whole exercise, and what kinds of class differences were in evidence. Do screeners tend to feel, for example, that the busted guy is really the bad guy but that rich white guys want to "make a Federal case out of it" (in this instance, a state case) and hire lawyers to paint the screener as the bad guy and the person who was busted as the innocent victim? Do they feel that they are just doing their jobs and that activists are engaging in a practically incomprehensible (and useless, and expensive) exercise in trying to turn things around so that there's made to seem something wrong with that? Is Sandra Ramos off somewhere cursing Barlow as a rich criminal who wants to waste her time trying to use sophistry to make her perfectly ordinary job sound somehow evil? But my observations don't really go into this kind of thing; it's just an idle question.
When I visited Aaron Swartz recently, he recommended a book called Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. Aaron suggested that this book is helpful for thinking about systems and institutions and how they shape the behavior of the people within them. I should probably rush out and read that, because it's an incredible thing to think about how the system is set up here and what kinds of outcomes it produces. Apart from the deeper matters of incentives and culture and whatnot, the aviation security system is set up so that screeners act as agents of policymakers who are totally unaccountable (nobody can even find out what policies they make). Hence screeners are just doing their jobs (with very little discretion in the sense that they are not invited to worry about what's right and wrong, what the fourth amendment says, etc.), while the people who set them to those jobs are never answerable to those affected by them. Then those who get caught up in the system are angry at the screeners, who, in the culture of secrecy, act as screens or shields for the trainers and bureaucrats who told the screeners what to do. If you try to go beyond that shield to ask who told these screeners to behave this way, and why, you are met with objections that national security precludes even telling you, let alone giving you a chance to change it.
This reminds me of the experience of getting a call from a modern telemarketer. I usually criticize the telemarketer for calling me (though politely, cordially), say that I don't want any further calls, and then try to track things back to the genuinely responsible party. I ask the telemarketer who is paying him or her. Today (despite the ironic prospect that this particular secret may violate Federal law) I usually hear that the telemarketer is a contractor and does not know the employer's identity or has been specifically enjoined not to reveal it. For example, I recently got what was probably an illegal solicitation call. I asked on whose behalf the call was being made, and the telemarketer responded that he didn't know, he just had a script, and he would be fired if he deviated from the script, and even if he did know who wrote the script, he would be fired if he told me. We can ask the telemarketers to quit their jobs, but, as their trade associations remind Congress, they've become an enormous part of the economy, and the economic pressures are simply incredible...
Now I am far afield from what danah wrote. Please have a look; it's pretty interesting. Another view of the courtroom elephant.
Here's one more thing about the institutional arrangements. Very possibly Ms. Ramos is reading this, if she isn't totally sick to death of reading about People v. Barlow already. But very possibly Covenant would fire her if she were to write to me to tell me whether she is or is not angry with Barlow or his attorney for what they said about her and what the case has put her through. Presumably Covenant doesn't let its employees talk about things like that without some kind of official clearance, because it might make Covenant look bad or might conflict with its official perspective on the case.
