Creating Print Versions of Pages

I was just thinking about how best to handle having web version of a page and a print version. There’s two approaches, one of them is having 2 separate pages http://www.tanyanam.com/contact and http://www.tanyanam.com/contact?version=print. But when you think about SEO, you’d have to either put “NOINDEX” on every printable page or block them in robots.txt. That’s a lot of work, and what I hate most about it is that you have to have 2 versions of each page on your site!

So a much better approach would be to have a stylesheet for the printable version and just switch the CSS files based on whether it is a browser, printer, mobile, etc. A great article on how to accomplish this: http://www.alistapart.com/stories/goingtoprint/

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