Why is it so hard to print a web page properly?

Question

I printed a page from a bank web site. Aside from the page with my data, I got five other pages with just a logo, just a header, just a footer, etc. It's sort of a joke in my household that you can't print a web page without getting a useless wasted page too.

So, why is it so hard? Are we blaming the web page designers, the browsers, or who? I would have thought this would be a mature technology by now and suffer from these idiotic little foibles.

I especially don't understand why printing from a "print preview" gives you something different from what you preview.

Answer 1

From here:

Two of the most common problems with printing occur when positioning other than static is used (e.g. position: absolute) or when there are floats.

Developers have the choice of making a special version of a given page so that it can be printed the right way. This can be achieved using the media type "print" with CSS.

See these pages for further reference:

Print Stylesheets

CSS Media Types

Answer 2

At best, web pages are designed to flow and scroll on various screen sizes. At worst, they only work on a single size screen. Printed pages obviously have pagination, not scrolling, and they use a fixed size.

As Leniel says, CSS media types provide a suitable mechanism to provide different styles on a printed page, but from my experience not many sites use it.

Answer 3

If you're looking for the programming perspective on this - it's hard, because screen size and resolution is different from the size and resolution of the printed page. Therefore most pages will not automatically print well - it's up to the web designer add CSS that's specific to printed output:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print-only.css" />

Most web designers are too lazy to do this unless there's a specific reason to print their page, so most pages don't print well.