RE: Relative colors in CSS?

On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Manos M. Batsis wrote:

>Or (ok I'm going too far here but...) you could use this in case of  "color blindness" if
>my English are right, by giving the user the option to change dynamically the whole scheme
>by changing one rule. Not bad for accessibility considerations.

Speaking a bit more generally, a style of coding stylesheets which relies
on (parent) relative properties instead of setting properties absolutely
produces compact and easier to maintain stylesheets which respond far
better to cascading than using absolute values throughout. The inclusion of
the generic 'inherit' value for most properties in CSS2 already shows that
this has been seen in the CSS WG. The same principle should probably extend
to colors, as well. Another useful application would be to let the
relativity extend beyond the expression of properties wrt the value of the
parent, and let the code query the current calculated values of arbitrary
properties. This way it would be possible to set e.g. colors and background
colors relative to each other. But this sort of thing is perhaps an overkill in
the simplified framework set by CSS.

Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university

Received on Wednesday, 20 December 2000 09:10:14 UTC