Posted by
jacky on Tuesday, July 07, 2009 12:00:00 AM
As things began to come together for the launch of ALA 4.0, we realized that the print styles weren’t up to where they needed to be. Thanks to some maddening browser behaviors,
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articles were printing out partially, or with severely mangled layout. It wasn’t just one browser, either. This was something that would need time and energy to address, and all our time and energy was going into making sure the launch went smoothly.
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But could we launch without print styles? After some discussion, we decided that the answer was yes. Given the low awareness of print styles and disinclination of most people to print out web pages, we figured that we could wait until after the launch to fix up and deploy the print styles, with little or no impact or notice.
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Okay, so we were wrong. How times change!
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After all, it used to be that the biggest question about print styles was whether or not they were really useful, let alone used by anyone of note. Sure, here at ALA we’ve been using print styles for a long time, and my previous ALA article “Going To Print” got a decent amount of attention. We’ll grant you all that. Even so, we were surprised at how many people asked after the print styles. Some of you came awfully close to demanding them. Times change indeed. Last week, we got the print styles up and running for our articles. Herein, I’d like to take a quick look at how the print styles were arranged, and reveal how one small omission caused a raft of problems in multiple browsers. Important unstyling The first step was the easiest: “switch off” the presentation of elements that were useless or confusing in print. For example, the sidebar is next to useless in print. So is the navigation bar across the top of the page. Leaving them in place for print means wasting paper, ink, and the reader’s time.
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Similarly, there was no real need for the discussion-related pieces of the page. And finally, I decided to save a little more ink and get rid of the ALA logo in the top left corner of the document.
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Why make the declaration !important? Because it’s, well, important that those elements not appear in print. I’ve been known to say that leaving !important in a publicly deployed style sheet is usually a sign of laziness, but I’d like to offer a modification to that maxim. I’ve come to believe that’s true within a given medium; that is, if you’re leaving in ! important directives on screen-medium styles to override other screen-medium styles, then odds are you’re being lazy.
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When it came to the top of the first page, I faced some interesting choices.
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The issue number, for example, is created by laying styled XHTML text on top of a background image. As many of you know, browsers by default will not print backgrounds, and there’s no way for an author to turn them on.
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The article is from http://www.alistapart.com/