Printing Backgrounds

Although they have an option to do so, by default most browsers don't print backgrounds.
I'd like to change that so that we print backgrounds for authors who have thought about
print and have set up their style sheets accordingly.

My idea was to turn on background printing for pages that have an explicit print style sheet.
To me that indicates the author has considered printing, and hopefully has used backgrounds
and colors accordingly. This is similar to the way Opera turns off its layout heuristics
for small devices when the author has explicitly specified a handheld style sheet.

David Baron doesn't like that idea as stated in
   https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381466
and wants something else "like a meta element or an @-rule" that an author specifies to
turn background printing on.

Note that if the author doesn't specify this meta element or @-rule or print style sheet,
backgrounds will still print if the user turns them on. And if the author does specify
the meta element or @-rule or print style sheet backgrounds still won't print if the user
turns them off. (Usually if the backgrounds are turned off, light text colors also get
tweaked to be darker.)

So, comments, ideas, proposals?

~fantasai

Received on Friday, 5 October 2007 21:42:28 UTC