Re: Printing and background colors/images

On Feb 22, 2011, at 11:47 AM, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:

> 2011/2/22 Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com>:
>> How about if the author could specify a message that would appear if the user was about to print something with backgrounds suppressed? It would only appear if the author provided the text content. The UA would provide a small preamble ("you are about to print with backgrounds suppressed"), and choices for continue or not and for whether it should be a permanent setting change or not. The author would write something like this:
>> 
>> @warning-no-background: "If you continue, your printout will not show text highlighting."
> 
> I can guarantee that the two most common responses to this will be:
> 
> 1. Hit "Okay" without reading the message, then complain that
> highlighting isn't printing.

The default would be "allow backgrounds to print this time", since the author thought it was important. So, no complaining. If the author's message was "you really want to print 5 pages of solid black ink, right?", which I think is an unlikely author choice, then the user can hardly complain about having their ink wasted, since they OKed it. 


> 2. Complaining about the broken website, because there's a dialog on
> there now that they don't know how to deal with.

If the implementor knows what they're doing, it would be very simple for the user to deal with occasionally. If it is much more than occasional, and the UA doesn't have a "remember this choice for the future" option, then maybe the implementors should rethink their broken-by-default-with-hidden-fixes situation that exists now.

Received on Tuesday, 22 February 2011 20:45:37 UTC