Re: "Printer-friendly" web pages
I've noticed that many websites have a "printer-friendly version" button
on certain pages. Click it and the information on those pages appears,
apparently still in HTML, in a way that prints out neatly using the
browser's Print command.
My question is: how the heck do they do that? Is that just smart HTML
design...?
Yep, that's pretty much it.
Typically the live content of a Web page resides in a database. The page is generated on the fly from a script. For example, in Microsoft's ASP technology (the one I'm most familiar with, although the basic idea is the same regardless of platform), the .asp file includes VBScript, SQL, JavaScript, and HTML code, the output of which is the HTML page served to the browser. Only the finished HTML goes out over the Internet. The work of creating that output stream is done by a program running on the server and interpreting the script. Think of the .asp file as a page template; it defines the graphic furniture around the edges, has spots for banners and ads (if present) that might be served by some third party, and has code that either grabs content directly from a database table, in the case of static copy, or somehow computes the content (think mapquest) based on information in a database.
Now a printer-friendly page is just another page template (.asp or otherwise) that accesses the same database content and presents it in a cleaner page, one that does not depend on frames, for example, or that has a simpler table structure that is guaranteed to fit all the copy within the width of the printed page. It also is set up with a white background and no border graphics, most likely.
Another feature that is sometimes added, just by using a different .css file and marking up the content properly, is hard page breaks, which make for neater printed output; but a lot of sites don't go that far.
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