You raise a good point about cascading for more involved background
uses. Then I suppose my next question is, how much do you think
people have _relied_ on the knowledge that gecko based browsers would
not print their backgrounds in order to avoid the effort of adding a
print stylesheet just to remove them (essentially doing what you've
already done for them) versus how much people unknowingly run into the
problem or alternatively never even realize that there is an issue?
I for one would imagine that a large majority are completely oblivious
to the fact that backgrounds don't get printed because any backgrounds
that they might have are not essential to the site (especially if you
do modify light colored text to read better). I would then venture to
guess that those same people have not nor will they ever bother
creating a print stylesheet. That only leaves one possible problem
which may be what your reviewer was getting at and that is, how many
CMS's and WYSIWYG editors include an empty print stylesheet if you
don't specify any print styles? I don't know the answer but the more
I think about it the more likely it seems that some would do that.
Or can you have a special exception for stylesheets that don't contain
any valid rules?
Rob
On 8/9/07, fantasai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Robert Van Dam wrote:
> >
> > I don't see anything confusing in it*. I suppose it might catch a few
> > developers off guard at first but going forward, I would imagine the
> > existing method is far more confusing to anyone unfamiliar with this
> > problem. What's more confusing, "I said show a background for printed
> > versions of the page and so you printed it" or "I said show a
> > background for printed versions of the page and so you ignored me"?
> >
> > * caveat: After rereading what you wrote I realized that I
> > misinterpreted your plan. My above comment would apply if and only if
> > the background was specified in the print style sheet. That would
> > seem to indicate to me that a developer knows what they want (as in
> > your opera example). Printing a background specified elsewhere just
> > because there is a print style sheet could easily catch a lot more
> > developers off guard and be more confusing (though probably still less
> > surprising/confusing than failing silently).
> >
> > Would it be reasonable to be that specific about when to print or not
> > to print a background?
>
> Well, 1. it would be a lot more difficult to implement, but 2. I think
> authors should be able to rely on the cascade working properly. For example,
> a page might have a light-colored background, and use backgrounds for
> accents e.g. on headings or table headers. I want to get rid of the
> overall light-colored background in favor of black on white, but I want
> all the accents to show up, too. If the cascade is working normally, all
> I need to do is specify a print stylesheet with
> body { background: white; color: black; }
>
> If the browser is being selective and only honoring backgrounds inside
> print-specific style sheets, then I'd need to duplicate all of my background
> and color settings in the print style sheet.
>
> Depending on how the CSS was authored, the combination of rules in the
> non-print-specific and print-specific sheets could result in a rather
> broken design if all the non-print-specific rules were suddenly ignored.
>
> When we disable all backgrounds, we know the background is always white
> and we can compensate by darkening the text colors if they are too light.
>
> ~fantasai
>
>
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