For many years I've pushed for print styles for sites. It's an easy step to take, easy to test, and the techniques to do it have been around for over a decade. With all the excitement over supporting mobile devices, web developers have started to adopt the concept of responsive web design (RWD), which allows your layouts to scale and reflow based on the device and browser size the visitor is using. Yet somehow the gee-whiz factor of these techniques have not helped the printed page, particularly on web sites that are often regarded as great examples of RWD.
With this site I hope to point out some of these well-regarded responsive sites and show how they fall short in the most basic ways. Perhaps this is the only way to get site owners to pay attention.
Some relevant articles / blog posts:
- More Evidence of the Need for Print Styles, April 6, 2012.
- Test in Lynx and Print, It's Your Job, December 12, 2011.
- More Samples of Responsive Web Design ≠ Print, October 13, 2011.
- Print Styles Forgotten by Responsive Web Developers, October 3, 2011.
While Print Shame does have print styles, the Blogger templates make it a bit tricky to purge and modify every element that I want to tweak. I have gotten rid of the comments fields, the share buttons, and the navigation, but retained any comments on the post. Since this site (or Blogger, in this case) doesn't use RWD, that also makes it harder to scale the elements the way I want.
If your site was featured here and you want to make some ad hominem attacks on this site for its print styles, go for it. It doesn't fix your site, however.
