[whatwg] window.print() when printing is not supported

Olli Pettay Olli.Pettay at helsinki.fi
Mon Dec 28 03:54:00 PST 2009


Hi all,

currently 
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/timers.html#printing 
says that window.print() should prompt user to print the page, but that 
"For instance, a kiosk browser could silently ignore any invocations of 
the print() method."

A print button in web pages is quite common, and if pressing that 
doesn't give any feedback (and the web page can't even detect if it 
should give some feedback of missing printing), the user experience
isn't quite optimal.

So I think it *might* make sense to throw some error if printing isn't 
supported. Or should browsers which don't support window.print() just
not have print() method in the window object? (problem is that I'd guess 
everyone just expects .print() to be there)


-Olli



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