[css3-page] Add way for webpage to signal UA to disable default footer/header

Background: Starting with version 19, Firefox includes a PDF viewer 
which is based on the PDF.JS project. The projects uses only HTML to 
implement a native-like PDF viewer.

Reading the spec I cannot find a part that defines what should happen 
with the UA's default header/footer of a HTML page when it is printed. 
In the usecase of the PDF viewer, as a user prints a PDF page s/he 
doesn't expect to see the default UA's print header/footer. To disable 
the default header/footer in Gecko/Firefox, I've implemented a new flag 
"moznomarginboxes" on the <html> tag [1]. With this flag, a webpage 
signals Gecko/Firefox to set the footer/header to "blank" by default. 
The user has still the possibility to change the footer/header to a 
different value then "blank" from the print-option dialog.

I'm aware that this is the CSS mailing list and not a HTML one, which 
might look more suited to discuss adding new flags on HTML tags at first 
sight. However, as CSS Paged Media spec defines a lot of the printing 
properties, I considered it worth raising this issue on this list.

Summing up, here are some questions that I hope lead to a good 
discussion of this issue:

- Does adding a flag like "nomarginboxes" makes sense?
- Is there a better way to specify "disable the browsers default 
header/footer when printing" by using CSS?
- Should there be a section added to the CSS Paged Media spec that 
specifies the UA's default footer/header behavior if there is a 
page-margin box defined using CSS (e.g. disable the UA's footer/header 
by default as soon as there is at least one page-margin box defined in 
the printed document)?

Very best,

Julian

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=743252

Received on Monday, 4 March 2013 14:30:36 UTC