XPS gets a unusual friend Google Chrome OS

Yesterday google announced Google Clound Universal Printing specification for Chrome OS. One of the surprising things for me was their intrinsic support for Open XPS format for printing. ( http://code.google.com/apis/cloudprint/docs/proxyinterfaces.html )

This is a surprise considering in XPS seems to be one of the least priority areas for Microsoft though it developed the specification. 

May be Googles decision  has to do with XPS being ECMA Supported, Open and XML. Anyway good to know that atleast the MS competitors are looking at good abandonware developed by MS

I got excited for a second, I thought they might be improving the way Google Chrome prints... Frankly it is shocking how horribly all three of the main browsers print, the lack of standards around printing, and general randomness around the whole process.

ManipUni said:

I got excited for a second, I thought they might be improving the way Google Chrome prints... Frankly it is shocking how horribly all three of the main browsers print, the lack of standards around printing, and general randomness around the whole process.

Hehe .. Sorry for getting you excited with the title.

I agree that lack of standard printing is one of key weak points of current web / browsers making it far more difficult to make many of current every day applications portable to web. I still wonder why despite so many advances in web browser for making it usable for every day applications ( Ajax, html5, Canvas, etc ) why printing is still so primitive.

xgamer said:

ManipUni said:

*snip*

Hehe .. Sorry for getting you excited with the title.

 

I agree that lack of standard printing is one of key weak points of current web / browsers making it far more difficult to make many of current every day applications portable to web. I still wonder why despite so many advances in web browser for making it usable for every day applications ( Ajax, html5, Canvas, etc ) why printing is still so primitive.

Agreed.

I think nobody cares. They all use metrics like speed, CPU usage, and ACID[x] to test the "quality" of their browsers. That's why you haven't seen browser UI change very much and why quality of life features are never addressed. The only reason we got built in web-search boxes was the HUGE amount of money to be made.

ManipUni said:

xgamer said:

*snip*

Agreed.

I think nobody cares. They all use metrics like speed, CPU usage, and ACID[x] to test the "quality" of their browsers. That's why you haven't seen browser UI change very much and why quality of life features are never addressed. The only reason we got built in web-search boxes was the HUGE amount of money to be made.

Well how many actually print to dead trees these days??

Although that is a huge complaint I do have about HTML5. 

D

DouglasH said:

ManipUni said:

*snip*

Well how many actually print to dead trees these days??

 

Although that is a huge complaint I do have about HTML5. 

 

D

Printing to a file (pdf, xps) can be even worse. At least Firefox has all the glitches that it has with normal printers, plus it splits a web page up into multiple pages for no reason.

Edit: actually IE does a decent job with printing to paper (I think since IE7). I haven't tested it printing to pdf/xps.

Wow, printing really is this bad. I am glad to know you guys think it is complete crap as well. This whole time I thought there were little tricks and methods to getting great prints.

Maybe web designers should start designing their webpages with print in mind.  Some specification that allows for the complete control of the print view? No idea what to do really. Printing will always be an issue. Printing to PDF, XPS, or to OneNote, it has to look good. Right now, it does not.

Who prints out web pages?

spivonious said:

Who prints out web pages?

Electronic books. DPI on paper is much greater.

spivonious said:

Who prints out web pages?

Due to lack of standards or lack of facility ( as intelman put it ) to control printview (WYSIWYG) designers / programmers do not encourage printing of webpage .

Simplest example is online banking or airline booking where most of the time you are given a pdf file to print  your statements / itinerary or ticket.

xgamer said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

Due to lack of standards or lack of facility ( as intelman put it ) to control printview (WYSIWYG) designers / programmers do not encourage printing of webpage .

 

Simplest example is online banking or airline booking where most of the time you are given a pdf file to print  your statements / itinerary or ticket.

Thing is, you can control print output of HTML with CSS (using the "print" media type).  Doing anything useful with this requires developers to do things right in their designs, though:  you're not going to produce a table layout that you can do anything useful with in a print stylesheet.

It seems that this new system only uses XPS for the print schema. It requires PDF for the actual print data.

And of course you'll still need a Windows PC to run their proxy software, or buy new hardware with support built in.

CannotResolveSymbol said:

xgamer said:

*snip*

Thing is, you can control print output of HTML with CSS (using the "print" media type).  Doing anything useful with this requires developers to do things right in their designs, though:  you're not going to produce a table layout that you can do anything useful with in a print stylesheet.

For the web applications I develop, I create some extra CSS-rules to control the printing: I change the fonts, colors, paddings and margins to look good on paper, I make hyperlinks look like regular text, I hide any part that's not useful on paper (navigation, clickable icons, …), etc…

This means I don't have to create printer-specific versions of pages. The printed output of my pages sometimes don't look anything like the screen version, which is a good thing.

Why not? from my perspective, xps is a somewhat likely document type to encounter, has good documentation on its spec, and is xml so would be a relative walk in the park to implement support for compared to say.. pdf

spivonious said:

Who prints out web pages?

Because the information is needed in paper form? Why should web-sites be the only media on a PC that is hard to print out?

Yes, we have the CSS media setting, but when browsers randomly break printing between non-major releases, and without any kind of standard or correct way to fall back on it ends up requiring a great deal of up-keep just to make sure it works.

I would love to see, for example, an XML standard that most operating systems and or browsers will accept - preview and send to the printer. XPS is wonderful but if you hosted one on your site it would just confuse users. Plus I have no idea how easy it is to reproduce manually (*Microsoft's formats aren't exactly known for being well designed - like Microsoft Office).