Have you ever printed out a web page and begun to realise why your expensive colour cartridges need replacing so frequently? I solve this problem by designing into my sites a Print Style Sheet. When you hit the “print” or the “print preview” button, a different set of layout rules are applied to the web page which reduces ink and paper usage by not including unnecessary parts of thew web page, like the navigation or the footer.
Similarly, when surfing the web using mobiles or handhelds such as Blackberrys you don’t want all the graphics but you do want the navigation links. For this I design a Handheld Style Sheet.
The screenshots below show a web page on a computer screen (left) and the same page when printed on paper (center) and how it might display on a hendheld device (right).
View normal version | View print version | View handheld version
Amazingly, most websites, including large corporate ones still don’t use these techniques to help the user. The emphasis is so much on screen appearance, other viewing options are completely overlooked.
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