Re: Printing and background colors/images

On Feb 22, 2011, at 12:44 PM, Brad Kemper wrote:

> 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. 

I really don't think it's appropriate to add functionality to CSS that causes browsers to throw up prompt dialogs. I very much doubt that we'd ever implement something like this in WebKit.

Simon

Received on Tuesday, 22 February 2011 20:53:36 UTC