# Yes, but the problem is that current browsers just don't do that
# figuring. Netscape will happily choose a font size, and then print the
# document with its right hand side beyond some point chopped off. Opera
# is a little better.
Netscape is _getting_ better. Gradually. 6.2 is still a long
way off from being good at printing, though. They worked on
the screen rendering stuff first and got around to printing
later, it seems -- typical for all internet-related things;
people who develop internet stuff typically have 24/7 access
and thus do not readily understand why people want to print
things off the net (in order to take it with them).
# But the real problem is deciding when to split to the
# next page.
There are ways to hint this in CSS, although browser
support is still developing.
# (though I am sure I have seen headers printed as the
# last line of a page somewhere).
Netscape 4.x does this consistently. But it will
eventually go away. (I think Netscape 2.x is almost
entirely gone from live usage now, except for people
who keep multiple browsers for testing...)
[And in another message...]
# [Note to HTML FAQ authors: you _do_ use stylesheets, don't you?]
Of course. Although I haven't tested how the HTML version
of my FAQ prints. It just never occurred to me... I
should probably do that...
# There's also XML, but that way has been known to lead only to madness.
I'm still using HTML 4 for now, too. Although I admit to having
taken steps to make an eventual conversion to XML easier...
# > TeX
#
# No. TeX is good, and it takes all the decisions it can, but
# there are still things you have to explicitly tell it.
# Number of columns is a good example.
Isn't that part of the markup?
# I personally have never liked the concept of
# stylesheets, and I almost always surf with stylesheets
# off on my browser.
I turned stylesheets off in Netscape 4 because of the
very poor support it had for them. In Mozilla 5 I now
leave them turned on but still disable document colours.
# I always thought that stylesheets try to do what
# cannot be done (at least I have never seen it done well):
# make the online look like print. As has already been
# pointed out several times in this thread, things that
# look good in print one way will look good online a
# different way and "the two shall never meet".
I don't understand how this is a *gripe* with style
sheets; if anything, this is an argument *for* style
sheets. You do know about the media= attribute for
style tags, right? Without stylesheets, you have
the style presumably built into the document with
deprecated tags and attributes (<font> and other
heinous abberations), and it will _never_ look
anything like good in both screen and print; you
will be lucky if it looks decent in _either_.
With stylesheets, you have only the content in
the document itself, and you put all the style in
separate stylesheets, so you can style the print
version and the screen version totally separately.
It is trivial to completely eliminate some elements
of the document (images, for example) from one
medium or the other. More importantly, you can
style the screen version as light-on-dark and the
print version as black-on-white, suggest different
fonts entirely, to say nothing of different sizes,
and... in short, you can style the document
separately for different media.
Unfortunately, browser support is lagging a little,
but it will come. It is coming already, in some of
the newest browsers.
-- jonadab
*************************************************************
To unsubscribe send a message to majordomo@faqs.org as
unsubscribe faq-maintainers fill-in-your-email-address-here
*************************************************************
[
FAQ Archive |
Search FAQ Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet References
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997 |
1998 |
1999 |
2000
]
© Copyright The Internet FAQ Consortium, 1997-2000
All rights reserved