There is no need to manually control the rendering of your site to alter layout. There is an easy CSS based feature that can be used to format your entire site for whatever options you need.
In this article we will see how to make the same site render automatically for screen, print, and hand held. There are other media types that can be used, but these will be the most common for daily use.
Wouldn't it be great if you could just alter the stylesheet for your site to adjust it slightly for printing or hand held devices? Then you could just create a single site, and use a modified stylesheet based on the media the site is being viewed on. Well, wishes do come true... observe!
<link href = "mysite.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link href = "mysite.print.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print"/>
<link href = "mysite.pda.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld"/>
All 3 lines (or ones like them) are placed in the <head> section of the master page, or in every html page if you are not using a master page. Note the normal html link to the stylesheet, with the addition of the media parameter. These media types are pre-defined and can be selected from a drop down in Visual Web Developer. The current list of supported types is here.
Now we can load a different stylesheet based on our needs! The next thing to do is to make a copy of our existing full stylesheet. If you do a lot of in-page formatting, you are going to rue the day you decided to do that.Making the Menu Disappear
To make any div simply cease to exist on a printed page, simply do this in the printer version of the stylesheet:
#graybar{display:none;}
#menubar{display:none;}
The display:none; means that this div or td (tablecell) will not be rendered when the browser is rendering to that media type - print in this case. so our entire graybar object is hidden.needless to say, your layout can be dramatically altered for smaller handheld displays.
The most brilliant thing is that the browser manages all this. So you never have to do anything conditional in your code that eats processor power. For instance, you don't have to have a "printer-friendly" version, the print engine will automatically choose the stylesheet intended for paper printouts. What's really cool is that you needn't worry what happens if you have a printer-friendly version of your site and people start navigating around - or linking to the version not intended for screen.
Layout for paper
OK, in word processors we taught ourselves to think in "points". then we started doing websites, and points make it all unmanageable, we opt instead for "pixels". But now we're actually designing websites for a paper media, so in the copy of the stylesheet, wherever you see the letters px, it's a good idea to re-arrange your thinking back into points. It can be a lot of work but you'll thank me later.
