Re: Printing and background colors/images

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Simon Fraser <smfr@me.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
I really think this is something that we should be able to figure out
without having to throw the burden to the user -- throwing up a prompt is
really no better than the current status quo. At the end of the day, IMO a
good user experience is that when the user says they want to print
something, they get a printout that makes sense. If the web developer is
actually thinking about printing and has a way to signal that, then the web
author is probably in a much better position to say what actually makes
sense to print. If the web developer hasn't thought about it, then we (the
UA) are the next best equipped to figure out what makes sense to print vs
what doesn't. The user is in the worst position to make that decision in
most cases, and has limited feasible interactions to signal their desire as
to what the output should look like.