From: Heitzso [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, 19 October 2004 8:08 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: web based applications and PRINTING > > > > Web printing 'was' notorious difficult for quite awhile, from the > > developer's point of view as well as the user's. The primary reason > > was > > at first the lack of tools at the disposition of the > webscreen designer, > > then later, the lack of faithful implementation of CSS > (cascading style > > sheets) standards by the browser makers (ie, IE). > > > > This technical hurdle doesn't really exist anymore since (most) > > standards are fairly well integrated now and new ones have evolved > > rapidly to keep pace with needs. > > Couple of months ago I tried to use CSS instead of > nested tables to control simple text placement. > No way could I do that -- then current (Aug '04) > IE and Mozilla (also tested Opera) implemented basic > CSS text positioning differently. Hair pulling out > time and/or beating head against wall time. I'm > guessing everyone is still using nested tables to > position text as a least common denominator instead > of doing it the "correct" CSS way. Anyway, I'm > flagging that CSS is not at all implemented > consistently across browsers. I'm not saying that > by using some subset of CSS that you couldn't > get it to work to print pretty pages, but if you > go into CSS cold with a book in hand about how > you are supposed to format pages with CSS be > prepared for a rude awakening.
Yes, that is our experience too - CSS works OK across browsers for setting fonts and colours, and for supressing things like buttons and other widgets when printing a page, but using it for complex page layout leads to days of wasted time trying to sort out differences and bugs in the way browsers render syntactically and semantically correct CSS code. Out of IE, Mozilla/Firefox and Konqueror/Safari, often the best we could do was to achieve a satisfactory result (using CSS for layout) in 2 out of 3, with the odd one out different each time. That's not to say CSS is useful. Tim C
