Re: [css3-gcpm] Printing backgrounds (thread reboot)

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 8:23 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
>> To start, the issue is that non-white backgrounds are the same cost as
>> white backgrounds on a computer screen, but are much more expensive
>> when printed.  Most webpages aren't designed with printing in mind,
>> and thus use far more non-white backgrounds than would be prudent in a
>> printed page.  To help users, most (all?) browsers automatically
>> suppress backgrounds when the user prints a page (and tweaks the text
>> colors as well, to maintain adequate contrast).  (It's theoretically
>> possible for browsers to do more than this, like suppressing
>> box-shadow, but no one does so far.)
>
> Correction: IE9 *does* suppress box-shadows in this situation.

The import of this being non-theoretical is that any situation
involving the 'background' property specifically is probably not
usable, unless you want to extend the same behavior switch to
box-shadow and any other properties that may in the future be affected
(like border-image, for example).  I think that would be a really bad
thing to force authors to do.

This means that option (3) is probably out of consideration.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 16 August 2011 03:28:02 UTC