RE: Printing and background colors/images

There’s additional value with a user setting as well, which sometimes trumps whatever the web author intended.  Please keep that in mind as you mull over feature ideas.

Examples:

1.       For some users, the web is a place where artists have lost to eye candy zombies.  The consequence of overuse of features makes the page unreadable, though the content is good.  Allowing for extracting text/content vs. background/noise when printing is currently a viable workaround in many cases.

2.       While the web author may prefer the goth look of white text on black background*, it burns a ton of ink when printing which isn’t friendly to the user, the budget, or the environment.

3.       General lack of accounting for “what would this page look like on a two color device?” in page design, perhaps hinting at a need to be able to express choices per-case in CSS markup.

A related concern:
When the target media doesn’t directly support the technology (gradients, vector graphics, blurring come to mind), sometimes a rasterized alternative isn’t really acceptable or at least isn’t really desirable. CSS recommendations on how to handle such cases would be useful (though they may already be covered by specs I haven’t read yet...CSS is big).

* Perhaps I’ve overstated this one a little bit.  For some authors, the intent might be to use the “cheap for this media” color for the background.  For example, on a phone or laptop black might be more battery friendly.  It would be interesting to see this accounted for directly in the CSS markup where colors are specified.  It would also be nice to see this expressable in SVG colors.  CAD images and blueprints are examples where a foreground+background colors are all you really need – and you probably want black+white when printing on a b/w laser printer, blue+white when printing on some stencil printers, and perhaps white+black on a phone/laptop.

-Brian

From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Ian Fette (????????)
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 9:17 AM
To: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Printing and background colors/images

Summary: Want authors to be able to specify whether backgrounds should be printed.
...