Printing a page online usually means printing
more than what you actually want. Webpages are quite fancy nowadays, with ad banners on
top, navigational links on the left, and so on. That's fine when you're viewing the page
online, but when you're printing the page, you only want to print out the "actual
content", and nothing else from the page! Many sites nowadays understand this, and
provide an alternate "print" version of the document that surfers can go to and
print out. Well, there's actually a much more elegant and seamless way of accomplishing
the same thing, and that is by using the <link> tag. IE 4+ (and hopefully NS 6 when it officially releases) supports a version of
the <link> tag that allows you to specify to the printer which file
it should print when the user selects print. In other words, the job of locating the
alternate print version of the document to print out is left to the printer, instead of
the surfer. Take a look at the below example, and it will all be clear.
Let's say you're interested in only printing out
the content in gray below from this page. As the webmaster, I could have helped you out by
creating another HTML document with only the below content, and telling you to go there
and print that document instead. However, I'm not going to do that. Instead, I've prepared
a Word document called printversion.doc, and by adding the following:
<link rel=alternate media=print
href="printversion.doc">
to the <head> section of this page,
informed the printer to directly proceed to printversion.doc and print it when you select
"print" on this page. In other words, the printer will print out
printversion.doc instead when you choose "print" on this page.
To see this in action, try printing this page now (you'll need IE 4 or above)!
The
following article discusses what DHTML is, and also the differences in implementation of
DHTML between Netscape Communicator and MS Internet Explorer 4.
What is DHTML?
DHTML(Dynamic
HTML) is a technology supported by Netscape Communicator and IE 4 that enables a web
document to be dynamic. DHTML is NOT JavaScript, but rather, a generic enhancement to the
browser itself that allows elements to be moved around, content to appear and disappear,
text to change even after the document has loaded etc. JavaScript (or any other scripting
language, for that matter), merely provides the means to access these enhancements. DHTML
is not a programming language, but a feature.
What's the difference between DHTML in
Communicator, and in Internet Explorer 4.0?
Everything. Communicator and Internet Explorer 4 are currently at very different
stages in terms of support for DHTML as recommended by WC3. In short, Communicator is
considered vastly behind in its support for true DHTML, while IE 4 is more on track. Its
important to realize that both browsers do not yet completely support the DHTML technology
as outlined by the WC3. Below lists how Dynamic HTML is implemented in the two browsers:
In Communicator:
- Dynamic HTML is mainly realized
through the <layer> tag. The <layer> tag can be moved around, hidden or
displayed, its content dynamically changed, etc. Netscape 4 relies exclusively on this one
tag when it comes to DHTML.
In Internet Explorer
4:
- Dynamic HTML is realized through
the browser itself (as opposed to any one tag), with the entire browser able to be
dynamic. All elements in a document can be dynamically accessed and altered on demand,
even after the document has loaded.
Demonstrations of DHTML in both
browsers can be found here. |
If you're using IE 4+, the output should be a word document
that contains only the contents of the gray box above.
As NS moves to support this new CSS definition (should it be
in NS 6), it's only a matter of time now that the job of specifying a print version of our
webpages becomes a lot simpler and elegant.
Discussion - Client Side Scripting
Related Sites - Dynamic Drive , A1 JavaScripts |
