Re: website: background color in css

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

Am Montag, 16. November 2009 11:34:22 schrieb Michal Suchanek:
> > 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?

I think the reason is simply that it's damn far from how I learned webdesign. 

Instead of the smooth learning curve you get by defining more and more aspects 
of your page bit by bit while you learn more about webdesign, it's "don't 
touch it or do all at once". 

That even goes for "when you use a picture you have to define all colors". 

And that's something I dislike a lot. 

It's prefectionism which makes life harder for everyone who writes a website. 

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

No. If a tool makes it far easier to break things than to do them right, then 
it's broken. 

Or the definition of what is broken is broken. 

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

The function of the pencil is not to write a novel, but to draw a line. 

If the pencil makes it much easier to cut the paper than to draw a line, then 
it is broken for most uses (there are special cases where these kinds of 
pencils are useful). 

> 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 don't. Instead I cycled through the default KDE colorschemes to test the 
colors - but I didn't get one with green background... 

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

So it's hurt in either way. 

If I do it "right", I hurt your eyes with a bright background, and if I do it 
"wrong" I hurt your eyes with mismatching colors. 

If I don't use custom color at all, the page please me. 

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

Wait. That means, their color code should dominate in every case. Then they 
can just ignore any author colors and enforce their color settings. 

> > ...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 options are there despite 

* No custom color
* One or several completely defined colorsets

> > 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.

I see a way through priorizing: Readability first, then author color then user 
color. 

> > 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.
> 
> 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.

And now it's IE + Firefox + WebKit(safari/Opera/...), all of which use similar 
defaults. 

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

So you define "right" as "50% do it that way and it works with my setting"? 

> No. I am using dark gray-green background and most of the text on your
> pages is quite hard to read.

That one wasn't in my test cases. Can you give me the colorcode of the 
background? 

Best wishes, 
Arne

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