> To me, a better solution would be for the system to pop up a notification informing the user that printing is not supported on this platform
That's the whole point of this article - when you can't control the various platforms that your application is run on, you want to try to do the "least bad" thing, even if that platform didn't anticipate the situation of, in this case, telling people that printing isn't supported.
The article is the other way around -- it's written from the perspective of a platform developer trying to deal with apps that didn't anticipate the situation.
Thanks for the clarification, you're correct. The nuance/complexity is that the platform developer must conform to a platform spec (in this case, the Windows API) that usually makes some underlying assumptions about the capabilities of the system that runs it, which may not always be correct.
Yes, I'd add to that by pointing out that the "spec" is a de facto spec subject to Hyrum's Law, that is, people have built their apps against other implementations of the platform and inevitably don't handle any behavior not seen on those other implementations.
That's the whole point of this article - when you can't control the various platforms that your application is run on, you want to try to do the "least bad" thing, even if that platform didn't anticipate the situation of, in this case, telling people that printing isn't supported.