Chapter 12. Printing and Other Media

Most users see the Web through a looking glass, also known as a computer screen. One of the characteristics of the computer screen is that it's a highly dynamic device: It refreshes itself 60 times per second. This allows video clips, animations, and other dynamic behavior to be incorporated into Web documents.

The printed page, on the other hand, is static: Once printed, a page never changes (except when the ink smears or the paper fades) and the hyperlinks on the page become inactive. Still, many people prefer to read from paper rather than from a computer screen. The paper provides higher resolution and higher legibility. You can make notes on paper and fold it into a plane and send it off. Try doing that with a computer screen!

Printouts from the Web are often of poor quality. CSS2 adds functionality to improve printing, and this chapter describes the new features:

• Page breaks You can say where you want page breaks to occur or where they should be avoided.

• Page margins and page orientation.

Also, CSS2 introduces a way to say that a style sheet (or a section of a style sheet) only takes effect on certain output media (for example, on a printer or a handheld Web device). This feature is known as media-specific style sheets, and it is described at the end of this chapter.