Why are media types expected to deprecate?

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This is based on the information contained here. As found at the end of that section, highlighted in the green box:

Note: It is expected that all of the media types will also be deprecated in time, as appropriate media features are defined which capture their important differences.

Why is it expected, exactly? While I have a better understanding of media types vs media queries, why would broad descriptions be deprecated? I didn't see too much else, but for instance, print vs screen - that provides a very, VERY easy way of creating a printer-friendly (or printer-UNfriendly, if you wanted to troll) web page, seamlessly - and so far any example that talks about using media queries ultimately include using the media type of print

Would we expect that media types just eventually become media queries as-is, allowing broad differences? How might one create a media query only version @media print, or is that not yet possible, hence why it's expected to deprecate in time, but not currently deprecated?

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1 Answers

The basic idea is that "print" may be too broad-brush. If we think about the characteristics of "print" versus "screen" we note that there are typically differences in (i) paged vs continuous media;(ii) DPI; (iii) color space; etc. So these could each be media features instead. Taking color space of printers for instance, toner behaves differently to ink, so you might want different CSS for each. And color space can also differ between screens, so when choosing your CSS for each color space, the distinction between print and screen is not necessarily a useful one compared to directly targeting the color space.

"it's expected to deprecate in time" means that this represents the current thinking of the spec writers. There's likely a significant amount of research still to be done to identify all the characteristics of print and screen media sufficiently to define the media features that would adequately replace the media types and allow them to be deprecated. Nor is it yet wholly clear that it will ever be the case, though the spec writers think it will. Finally, spec writers change their minds over time. It might yet come to pass that media types will continue to have a role to play in the future.

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