If you were to try to print out a web page
exactly as it appears on your screen, chances are you would end up wasting a lot
of ink and paper printing unnecessary page elements, or worse yet, the content
you printed would be illegible.
That's why links to "printer-friendly" versions of web pages
are all over the Internet, especially on news and business sites. When you click
this kind of link, you are given a web page design or shell that contains the
same text as what you see on your screen, but in a minimal version that is,
well, friendlier (or easier) to print.
To create this printer-friendly version of the text, you
traditionally would either have to manually convert the web page content to a
new, stripped-down page, or use a script dynamically to generate a separate page
design. With CSS, however, you can "automagically" redesign documents when they
are printed, thereby eliminating the need to code a separate, printer-friendly
version as well as saving on server resources typically required to generate the
page.
Support for print-media CSS is fairly commonplace these days.
Currently, the browsers that support this aspect of the technology include
Internet Explorer 4+ for Windows, Internet Explorer 4.5+ for Macintosh,
Navigator 6+, Safari, and Opera.
There are print-only properties associated with CSS. However,
these properties have limited support among the browsers on the market; Opera 5
and 7 are the only browsers that support more than two of these kinds of
properties (15 printing properties out of the 16 in the specification). Because
of this reality and the nature of this book to focus on practical, cross-browser
nature of CSS, the recipes in this chapter are geared to styling the contents of
the page rather than dealing with the theory of CSS printing properties. For
more information on CSS printing properties, see Chapter 14 of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
(O'Reilly).
This chapter teaches the basics of how to tell the browser
which style sheet to use when sending a document to print. It also discusses how
to switch graphics from web to print CSS, as well as how to develop a document
for printing.
