Re: [css3-page] examples in 3.3.2 (page size) are 'US-centric'(?)

* Ernest Cline wrote:
>For the North American paper sizes,  I'd say that
>na-letter
>na-legal
>na-ledger
>is probably the practical minimum with
>na-invoice
>being a possibility depending upon how important it is to support
>a keyword that will mostly be used for 2-up printing on na-letter
>or 4-up printing on na-ledger..

I would rather question the importance of page size keywords in general.
If I would print web pages, they would be printed to A4 no matter what a
style sheet might specify; with this in mind, I have little reason to
suggest or even request specific paper in my style sheets, I am certain
the user knows better what paper sizes are available and how he would
like to print my page. To me its much like

  @window { size: 1024px 768px full-screen }

something I would not suggest either. I guess the same applies to most
authors aswell. What I fear is that the more convenient it is to specify
a specific paper size, the more people would specify it just for
"completeness" and probably rely on the specification when defining page
margins etc. which would probably complicate printing with to a
different page size; probably even annyoing if my user agent pre-selects
"letter" as paper size or throws an error message if I attempt to print
to A4 while the style sheet requests "letter". Also, the more keywords
are available, the less likely that authors would remember what keywords
are allowed, so they would likely specify keywords that are not allowed.

I believe that the page size descriptor should only be used to specify
page dimensions if you are certain that the medium you request is
available and I believe that if you are in such a position you would
probably know the phyiscal dimensions of that paper aswell; using a
keyword instead would thus be of little benefit for a small number of
authors.

I prefer the Media Queries approch, you suggest specific layout for
specific page dimensions. If this were about a MQ extension to allow

  @media print and (page-size: A4) { ... }

in place of

  @media print and (width: 21cm) and (height: 29.7cm) { ... }

I would be in favour of additional keywords, but for the page size
descriptor I believe the fewer keywords the better. I can live with A4
and letter though and I would not mind if these were renamed to iso-a4
and na-letter for consistency, but I am opposed to additional keywords.

Received on Thursday, 22 January 2004 21:18:09 UTC