- From: lilley <lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 15:53:07 +0000 (GMT)
- To: megazone@livingston.com (MegaZone)
- Cc: www-html@w3.org, www-style@w3.org
MegaZone said:
> Once upon a time Erik Aronesty shaped the electrons to say...
> >adding print specifications to the document. It is rediculous to respecify
> >margins and
> >paper settings for each document..or to allow the browser to break the page
I agree. However, adding more tags to HTMl to control printing is not the
best way to go.
> I think some of this belongs in style sheets.
Yes, absolutely. For example, this is expressible now in CSS1
html { color: #000; background: #FFF; margin-top: 60pt; margin-bottom:40pt }
html { margin-left: 90pt; margin-right; 90pt }
h1, h2, h3 { font-family: helvetica }
.noprint { display: none }
That sets document-wide margins, defines any element with
class="noprint" not to be displayed - oh, and sets major headings in
Helvetica.
> Except for the pagebreak, since that has to be in the content.
Disagree. How do you know where the page finishes? This depends on the
particular font size used and the precise position of linebreaks and so
on ... Simpler to define some properties that are most useful on pagwed
output devices. So we could write
h1 { break-after: never; break-before: always }
h2 { break-after: never; break-before: ok }
.breaknow { break-after: always }
for one particular style of formatting. These sort of properties were
in the early CSS drafts, but I think got moved to css2.
Other handy things a print stylesheet might do include putting the
title, url, last modify date and so on in headers or footers, as some
browsers do now.
> ><PRINT LEFTMARGIN=x RIGHTMARGIN=x PAPER=x SCALE=x STYLE=x LANDSCAPE>
> >This region will use the above print settings and print style....
>
> The problem I see with this is the large variety of printers. Some don't
> do landscape, some don't do graphics, etc. How deep a level of control
> would we want?
And what happens if I have <PRINT PAPER=A4> and yiou have a printer with
only a US-letter paper tray? Better to let the browser lay out the page
on whatever paper size the reader has, just lie it lays out the
on-screen presentation on whatever window size the reader has.
> THis is badly formed from my understanding, wouldn'g <PAGEBREAK> or <PAGEBR>
> be better? Similar to <BR>. I see this as another opening <PRINT> tag and
> I don't fell good about mixing behavior - some need closure and some don't.
Yes, you can't express this sort of thing in a DTD. Same tag name used for
different elements, some of which are empty and some are not. Can't be done.
> ><PRINT NOPRINT>
> >This region will not be printed, only seen
> ><PRINT NOREAD>
> >This region will not be seen, but will be printed
This is readilly accomplished with css1 by using two classes -
say noprint and noview - as used above.
> Why would you want to do these two actions? I don't want my printer to
> start spewing stuff I didn't expect to print, and if I see something on
> screen I want to print I don't want to find the paragraph I wanted was
> deleted from the hardcopy, it would piss me off to say the least.
OK so you have identified a potential for abuse. Isn't there always? But one
can always disable stylesheet processing or use an alternative personal
style sheet
This happens now, anyway. <title> effectively is presented on screen like
this:
title { display: none }
--
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C
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Received on Friday, 16 February 1996 11:01:15 UTC