Showing posts with label CSS Media Types. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CSS Media Types. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

CSS Media Types


Media Types allow you to specify how documents will be presented in different media. The document can be displayed differently on the screen, on the paper, with an aural browser, etc. 

Media Types

Some CSS properties are only designed for a certain media. For example the "voice-family" property is designed for aural user agents. Some other properties can be used for different media types. For example, the "font-size" property can be used for both screen and print media, but perhaps with different values. A document usually needs a larger font-size on a screen than on paper, and sans-serif fonts are easier to read on the screen, while serif fonts are easier to read on paper.

The @media Rule

The @media rule allows different style rules for different media in the same style sheet.
The style in the example below tells the browser to display a 14 pixels Verdana font on the screen. But if the page is printed, it will be in a 10 pixels Times font. Notice that the font-weight is set to bold, both on screen and on paper:

<html>
<head>
<style>
@media screen
  {
  p.test {font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:14px;}
  }
@media print
  {
  p.test {font-family:times,serif;font-size:10px;}
  }
@media screen,print
  {
  p.test {font-weight:bold;}
  }
</style>
</head>

<body>
....
</body>
</html>

See it yourself ! If you are using Mozilla/Firefox or IE5+ and print this page, you will see that the paragraph under "Media Types" will be displayed in another font, and have a smaller font size than the rest of the text.

Different Media Types

Note: The media type names are not case-sensitive.

Media TypeDescription
allUsed for all media type devices
auralUsed for speech and sound synthesizers
brailleUsed for braille tactile feedback devices
embossedUsed for paged braille printers
handheldUsed for small or handheld devices
printUsed for printers
projectionUsed for projected presentations, like slides
screenUsed for computer screens
ttyUsed for media using a fixed-pitch character grid, like teletypes and terminals
tvUsed for television-type devices