14.2. Paged Media

In CSS terms, a paged medium is any medium where a document's presentation is handled as a series of discrete "pages." This is different from the screen, which is a continuous medium: documents are presented as a single, scrollable "page." An analog example of a continuous medium is a papyrus scroll. Printed material, such as books, magazines, and laser printouts, are all paged media. So are slideshows, where a series of slides is shown one at a time. Each slide is a "page" in CSS terms.

14.2.1. Print Styles

Even in the "paperless future," the most commonly encountered paged medium is a printout of some document—a web page, a word-processing document, a spreadsheet, or something else that has been committed to the thin wafers of a dead tree. Authors can do a number of things to make printouts of their documents more pleasing for the user, from affecting page breaking to creating styles meant specifically for print.