bug-hurd
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: website: background color in css


From: Michal Suchanek
Subject: Re: website: background color in css
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:34:22 +0100

2009/11/15 Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de>:
> Am Sonntag, 15. November 2009 19:44:57 schrieb Michal Suchanek:
>> They can offer alternate dark and bright themes.
>
> But that requires setting all colors again.
>
> It makes it impossible for people to get into webdesign bit by bit - either
> you define all colors or you leave your hands off colorchanges.

Yes, that's what you do if you want a working web page.

>
> If you set the background, you also have to set all other colors, else the
> custom user color for a visited link could be invisible.

Yes, that's how things work. Why is it so hard to accept for you?

>
>> Yes, you cannot set just link color and expect it would work.
>
> Then HTML+CSS is broken, because it allows just that without supplying default
> colors which should be used whenever even a single custom color is set or
> defining a clear way to deal with conflicting colors (invisible/unreadable
> foreground).
>
> If there's a language which makes it the easiest to change just one detail,
> but which breaks when authors do just that, where's the bug: In the language
> (and implementation) which supplies that default or in the authors who use the
> language in the way in which it is most comfortable for 95% of the authors and
> users?

If a tool allows breaking something is the tool inherently broken?

By this definition everything is broken.

A simple pencil allows you to write poor novels, incorrect equations,
even misspelled and unreadable words!

>
> (I'm pretty sure that 95% of the users don't use deep blue or red backgrounds,
> and very many pages don't supply a custom background color - including the
> general GNU pages which also have spaces where no background color is defined
> but the text color is defined as a grey).

95% users don't know how to change their default page colors.

If you want your pages to work for the remaining few that do know how
to set the default colors and use the feature you can't just expect
that they will use the same color as you.

>
> I generally try to change as little as possible to get the effect I want (do
> you know how a bright background color hurts late at night when you've been
> working with dark backgrounds for a few hours?)

Unreadable text also hurts, and that's what I experience on pages like yours.

 I have a stylesheet in my browser for fixing pages like the GNU pages
that set text color but no background. When I want to read more than
1-2 sentences on the page I apply the stylesheet.

If you want your pages to be usable by people with different
preferences you cannot impose your preferences on them, even
partially.

>
>> So you can either have completely colorless pages
>
> ...and lose the wide range of options you have when you use colors for
> different parts of the text. Since people began using different colors for
> titles, the web looks far more friendly to me.

There are many options at your disposal but you want to stick to the
one that does not work. Your choice.

>
>> which are based on
>> the user style or completely styled pages. Anything in between is
>> broken.
>
> Or seen from a different angle: browsers aren't built to handle efficient
> colorchanges (allow authors to set one color by only using the custom color if
> it mixes well with the other colors used for the site).

No, it 's the HTML standard which is unfitting for such use of color.
The browsers can only work with that.
And I do not see an easy way of standardizing that text should always
be readable but it also has to follow both web author's and user's
colors at the same time.

>
> In the beginning there was a standard colorscheme (white background, blue
> links, black text). At some point graphic browsers added custom stylesheets,
> so I as user could select to see pages with the colors I chose.

There was never a standard like that. Only when 95% users used
Internet Explorer and 95% of them did not know how to change the
default colors web authors could get away with relying on the IE
defaults. At he time before IE dominance it was IE+Netscape dominance
and the defaults of Netscape Navigator differed only in the background
color: it was gray.

>
> There the style setting got jarred, because it misses a standard way to react
> to custom author colors which don't work with the custom user scheme.
>
> So I'd say, in this point you're wrong. If a user wants to use a color scheme
> which doesn't work with many sites, he can tell his browser to ignore the
> sites CSS colors. That shouldn't stop a site author from using a different 
> text
> color which works with most backgrounds, though.

My color scheme works with about half the sites. The sites that are
styled correctly.

>
> He can also disable his styling temporarily.
>
> If you browse my sites with a red background, you're running into a problem,
> that's true. But on the other hand they look good with bright background and
> mostly good with dark background, and they keep their identity, though the
> background color changes.

No. I am using dark gray-green background and most of the text on your
pages is quite hard to read.
I use light color with that and I get decent contrast and nice
readability with my default colors but I don't get that on your pages,
far form that.

>
> What's broken is that I can't say "as long as the background color is in the
> range xxxxxx-xxxxxx, use red for the text".

You can probably do that with Javascript. Good luck with that.

>
> ...
>
> But I just found that the reason why some pages look jarred to me is not that
> they define a text color and not a background-color, but that there's a long
> standing konqueror bug which makes konqueror ignore my text color setting and
> use black instead:
> - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47320
>
> Morale of the story: It's good to sign bug reports with wishes, even when the
> wishes aren't easy ones, because one might find similar bug reports which give
> useful additional information :)
>

I'm not interested in Konqeror bugs. They are not web problems in
general, they are specific to Konqeror . If Konqeror does not work for
you use another browser.

Thanks

Michal




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]