Musings on "View Source"

It's not an original thought that View Source has greatly enhanced the beauty and usefulness of the web. I was thinking on it today because a little trick I came across

#nav a:active, #nav
a.selected {
background-position:0 -64px;
}

What we have is a button which when you hover over it switches to display a different part of the button picture, which in this case displays the button text in a different colour. You can see it at: wycliffe.org.uk.

With the print medium to produce stuff you need decent software like Quark Express, which costs, as well as the money to print in colour, on nice paper. So not many people produce magazines and books. (I know we have the rise of DTP, but what that's done for the print medium is another discussion...)

Imagine if the web were the same - you had to buy Dreamweaver or equivalent to produce websites; you had to pay a significant ongoing cost to host your site. There would be no blogs, no personal websites on your free webspace from your ISP, no small company, small charity/school/church websites. A very different place.

Now imagine if you had View Source for print media. Imagine if it were easy to nick the layout used by Hello magazine, say, and put your own photos and text in. Imagine if you could print a run of a 100 of them for the price of a burger. You could do a special magazine for a wedding. Pamphlets and fanzines would be all over the place. Interesting to let your mind wander...